Susan Hardy and Anthony Corones

Colonising the Past?

History, Medicine, and Reality Television

In 2005, the ABC's 'reality television' production, Outback House, went to air. The production involved 'transporting' people back to a midnineteenth century Australian outback house to live, as authentically as possible, as a squatter's family would have done in that period. This paper examines the experience one of us had of contributing, as a consultant historian, to the making of Outback House. Our analysis is based on the idea that Outback House can be represented as an attempt to colonise the past in three senses: (1) as participants, (2) as observers, and (3) as historians. The focal question of the paper is whether such colonisation is possible in any of these senses. The answer offered is no; but the journey to that answer is, we argue, historiographically valuable. There are, further, some useful insights to be gained about the representation of medicine in so-called 'reality television' and the nature of historical representation more generally.

A historian's involvement in reality television

History on television is both a growth area, for example, the popularity of the History Channel, documentaries and drama series (television history has been referred to recently as 'the new gardening' ¹ ), and also an increasingly important field of academic study with conferences devoted to it, attended by such luminaries as David Cannadine and Simon Schama, asking questions about its meaning and impact. ² It is timely, therefore, to start examining such issues in an Australian context and from a History and Philosophy of Science perspective.

History on television is not new (as, for example, in fictionalised series and documentaries) but 'reality history' is a recent arrival on our screens, perhaps as a more respectable relative of the phenomenon of reality television in general. ³ We have in mind series such as The 1900s House, The 1940s House, Frontier House, Regency House Party, The Edwardian Country House, The Colony, and others. Outback House belongs to this genre. What understanding do we gain by placing some of our contemporaries (painstakingly selected from hundreds of volunteers) into allegedly historical circumstances and filming their experiences? How 'real' can this situation be, given that reality television in general presents so many problems of definition and practical application, having shifted position from early attempts at concentrating on 'life as it is lived' ⁴ to what is now seen more as a situation of 'discourses of display and performance'? ⁵ Add to this the confusions and complications of defining what is meant by the term 'history' ⁶ itself, and the initial internal contradictions of the term 'reality history' assume major semantic problems.

Moreover the program makers themselves seem, at the very least, to be ambivalent about their initial aims and the ways and means used to achieve them. Are they simply trying to 'engage with…viewers by asking them to imagine themselves transported back in time to a particular historical moment' or are they trying to provide 'a bridge between the academy and the mass television audience'? ⁷ Are participants supposed to 'become' inhabitants of a particular time and place or are they to be encouraged to 'question and interrogate the experience from a twenty-first-century perspective'? ⁸ Will the finished result tell participants and audience more about today's expectations than yesterday's experiences?

Needing to develop some way of grappling with these difficult issues, we decided to focus on the idea of 'sending' people back to the past, and developed this idea by analogy with actual colonisation. We have used the concept of 'colonising the past' to help analyse these attempts at producing what might be called 'public histories,' ⁹ given that members of the public are used to history conveyed to a mass television audience (rather than academics conveying history to an academic audience). Sending some of our contemporaries back to live in the past is not unlike sending people out from the 'mother country' to settle in the colonies, for we are indeed sending them to a 'distant land'; only in this case, we also add the dimension of time by attempting to recreate the conditions of the past. The reports we get back from these 'futurist' colonists of how they are coping in the 'distant land' would not be in principle so very different from the letters the folk back home would have received from their colonist relatives and friends with, however, some important caveats that will be noted later.

Crucially, the public volunteers are active participants in the life of the 'colony.' They are having experiences that the television audience, as observers, are not having. Rather, the audience is 'colonising the past' in a vicarious sense, through the medium of the reactions of the participants to their colonial conditions. We can't all be sent to the colony in order to see how we might be affected thereby, but we can have some sense of what it might be like by observing our contemporaries.

Finally, as historians, we might simply be part of the television audience, while complaining bitterly about the historical shortcomings and inaccuracies of such productions; but if we are co-opted as part of the production process of such a series, we 'colonise the past' in a different sense again. Of course, as academic historians, we engage constantly with the past in quite palpable ways; but the demands of sending a group of people back to the past is quite different from trying to take our readers there in imagination. Needless to say, historians who are involved in setting up museum displays are much more likely to consider the physical and experiential aspects of what they are doing and the effects on their museum audience; ¹⁰ but in this particular case, speaking as 'bookish' historians, the demands of recreating past conditions and trying to put people into those conditions helped cast a very different light on the representation of history from our usual page-bound concerns.

Looking specifically at Outback House, the guidelines were as follows: participants were to live in a carefully constructed environment as close to that of the 1860s period as possible and they were to be 'trained' in the personal and practical skills necessary for the period. However the aim of training was not to tell participants how to act but rather to show how their (1860s) counterparts would have acted and why—that is, to explain how nineteenth-century mindsets and mores (the 'world view') differed from those in the twenty-first century. Participants, however, were not to 'role-play' but to live (the 1860s) life as authentically as possible; although, it turned out that once in the House, individuals pursued 'authenticity' to varying degrees, ¹¹ plainly not an option for genuine nineteenth-century colonists. It will be obvious therefore that the internal contradictions noted above existed from the very inception of the program.

Image 1: 'Mediating' the past on the set of Outback House (Photograph by Ron Ekkel. Courtesy of the photographer)

As part of the Outback House project, the ABC production team hired specific trainers and consultants for their expertise in and knowledge of various aspects of mid-nineteenth-century outback life and one of the authors, Susan Hardy, was contacted as a 'suitable expert' on nineteenth-century pioneer medicine and feminine hygiene, topics that until relatively recently would have been the province of local historians and antiquarian collectors (that is, 'public history' in another guise) rather than of academic study.

Dr. Hardy's role as advisor was to explain the following aspects of health and disease, with special reference to the situation in colonial New South Wales: the general background to nineteenth-century health care and therapeutics; calling the doctor; menstruation, contraception and 'women's problems'; and medicines and their uses, all to be covered in a day-long training session at a country motel, with only the female participants present. The approach was to be detailed and informative, as well as practical, and interesting enough to hold the attention of a disparate group of participants, all of whom had spent the previous few days being bombarded with more than they had ever wanted to know about, for example: cheese making (popular), hair styling (less popular, especially the issue of using lard) and training in using the long drop toilet (very, very unpopular). ¹²

This day-long training session was the limit of Dr. Hardy's contact with participants, and the end of her participation in the production. There was, therefore, no opportunity for oversight of participant behaviour during the course of filming, for 'historical correction,' or for further discussion with the participants; though clearly, it is possible to imagine a situation of ongoing participation by the 'experts' in the course of filming.

The following subsections reflect the background talks given to the participants together with accounts of the practical sessions.

An account of the general background to nineteenth-century colonial health care and therapeutics

Medicine from the earliest times has featured what have been termed a 'high' and a 'low' tradition, the former representing what the medical profession believed and practiced and the latter showing what the public as patients believed and wanted. Sometimes these approaches coincided; frequently they clashed. ¹³ In order to differentiate themselves from the empirics or 'quacks' most regular physicians believed that their practice should be based on current medical theory, which in the mid-nineteenth century, was still that of the Hippocratics, involving the 'rebalancing' of an 'unbalanced' or sick body, the evidence of this state being symptoms felt, seen, or sensed by the patient and recounted in the 'history' to the doctor—symptoms such as unusual sensations, inappropriate cold or heat, sweatiness, pallor, lethargy, and so on.

In the Australian colonies, the climatic conditions were seen to affect directly the health of the white European colonists by 'a system of dynamic interactions with the environment.' ¹⁴ However there was disagreement as to whether these climatological and environmental effects were creating better specimens of humanity or were enervating and debilitating; for plainly there was a problem with depicting the entire white population as so badly affected by an unfamiliar climate that they were unable to function in peak performance at work and play. ¹⁵ In order to encourage the immigration of free settlers, especially from England, ¹⁶ the climate of Australia was depicted as sun filled, mild and healthy, although letters home often complained loud and long about the heat and humidity, the dust and the flies.

Therapy was seen as 'rebalancing' the body, which was either in an 'excited' or 'debilitated' state, by altering the diet—with bland food and drink for the overexcited, and rich for the debilitated; by recommending more or less exercise; and by depletion of 'excess' fluids by mechanical means such as bloodletting and purging or by pills or medicine. A daily routine of exercise was advocated although 'reckless exposure to rain' was obviously asking for trouble, as was stripping off an upper garment in the heat. Indeed the wearing of a flannel shirt next to the skin 'at all seasons of the year' was recommended to guard against variations in temperature. ¹⁷ Covering the head and the base of the spine were both seen as essential in the prevention of 'sunstroke,' which was recognised to be one of the first stages of insanity. ¹⁸

The extent and nature of the advice to potential colonists thus shows that unfamiliar and unexpected conditions would be encountered; but not usually of a type so alien that they could not be coped with at all, as some plainly were for the participants in Outback House.

An account of calling the doctor

Ideally, from the doctors' point of view, the approach to health and disease noted above should be undertaken with their detailed advice and under their supervision. ¹⁹ In practice, many people considered themselves quite capable of self-diagnosis and treatment. Indeed the popularity of such works as Finch's Guidebook to the Squatter's Medicine Chest ²⁰ and Fullerton's Family Medical Guide ²¹ indicate the extent to which people living in isolated areas had often to rely on their own resources, although it was noted that 'young surgeons who come out [to New South Wales] are soon tempted up the bush by pleas from the squatters who want a surgeon to settle among them' ²² and who were prepared, at least initially, to offer monetary inducements to do so. However the problems and pressures of a bush practice were numerous including being thrown from horses and buggies on rough terrain on rides to far-flung properties, being set upon by bushrangers, the uncertainty of income, isolation, and the heavy responsibilities of 'up country practice.' Such pressures required from doctors a mental and physical stamina that not all by any means possessed, resulting in an unreliable provision of bush medical care, sometimes due to drunkenness or drug taking but sometimes simply due to expected lack of remuneration for long and arduous journeys and time-consuming treatments. ²³

The situation of the 'dearth of country medical men,' especially those of a reliable or respectable type, led to squatters taking other routes to health care: either consulting and buying from the local chemist ²⁴ or from travelling 'quacks'; or, as noted above, relying on self-help, just the situation that colonial doctors were making prolonged efforts to prevent. ²⁵

The participants in Outback House should not, then, have expected to be either able or willing to call the doctor and self-sufficiency should have been their approach to medical problems. As we shall see, that turned out not to be the case.

An account of menstruation, contraception, and 'women's problems'

Menstruation has always been an issue for girls and women to have to deal with, albeit for fewer years than is currently the case in developed countries, due to later on-set, more pregnancies, poor nutrition, and earlier death. Nevertheless the associated practical difficulties must have contributed to keeping many females (or at least those who had the luxury of choice) in the private rather than the public sphere.

Referred to recently, rather optimistically, as 'the wise wound,' ²⁶ menstruation is much less heard of in historical accounts when compared to other physical issues such as battle wounds, surgery, or even childbirth, so it is difficult to find much reliable, direct evidence for past approaches and experiences. Some information comes from indirect sources such as murder trials in which bloodstains were an important part of the evidence. ²⁷ More information in recent times has come from oral history and from less inhibited reminiscences. ²⁸

Upper- and middle-class women were expected to set aside five to seven days a month for 'periods of ill health,' 'monthlies,' 'time of the month,' 'being unwell,' 'being indisposed,' or 'being unstrung' (the latter interestingly similar to the Hippocratic notion of 'tuning' the body). There were notions of 'menstrual mania' and 'hysteria' that may have been similar to current notions of PMS. Lower- and working-class women were 'sturdy' and were expected to work through being 'on the rag,' 'visiting aunt so-and-so,' 'having fleas,' or whatever the local euphemism was. There is a possibility that many women, up to and including the nineteenth century, actually wore no protection at all but simply 'bled into' their often dark coloured clothes, hence the wearing of skirts rather than trousers, so that legs could be wiped as necessary. Practical reasons, such as a dearth of rags, certainly could account for this practice but it could also be justified on the Hippocratic grounds that stopping the free flow of blood was somehow unhealthy and also, of course, smellier.

Domestic servants in upper-class houses often had to be instructed in how to construct pads, indicating that this was something they were not used to doing; also the soiled pads would provide evidence that they were not pregnant. ²⁹ Nevertheless, the 'rag bucket' (see below) seemed to be a taken-for-granted household object by the end of the century, showing that increasingly the 'free flow' approach was impractical.

No commercial sanitary products were available until the early-twentieth century, so in the Australian bush, as elsewhere, homemade pads, referred to as 'rags' or 'bandages,' were made from whatever was available (ideally, gauze covered in cotton or flannel), worn until saturated, soaked in a bucket, boiled, dried in a discreet place, and reused. This 'rag procedure' would be difficult enough in reasonably civilised circumstances, however, in isolated bush circumstances it would take on extra levels of complication, added to which would be the necessity to avoid any uninitiated male viewing of the procedures. ³⁰ Belts made of tape—with extra tape sewn or tied to the ends of the pad—were used because underclothes, if worn, were not suitable to keep pads in place. An alternative was to create a loop or fold at the end of the pad through which the tape (belt) could be threaded. Later, safety pins could be used. Leakage or seepage of blood would be frequent although the large size and bulkiness (61x28cms) of the pads helped. Baking soda was sprinkled on pads to remove or decrease the smell, which was strangely claimed to be erotic by some, but not generally by women. Opium or laudanum, or, less drastically, hot water with ground ginger and sugar, was taken for menstrual cramps, together with hot packs on the abdominal area.

Contraception or control of fertility was becoming a topic of discussion among intellectuals in the nineteenth century but was not widely discussed among ordinary people. Nevertheless attempts were made to prevent pregnancy, particularly in inauspicious circumstances, the Australian outback certainly being one of those. ³¹

Methods of birth control in the midnineteenth century were much the same as had been available since early times, circulated mainly by word of mouth. ³² Professional advice and commercial products were not widely available or even considered respectable until well into the twentieth century. As this topic was rarely discussed in print, it is difficult to know what was actually happening in private. Best guesses include: total abstinence (impractical); the 'safe period' (not accurately calculated); withdrawal (tricky and not infallible); female douches of weak vinegar, sulphate of zinc, green tea, or just water (hygienic but not spermicidal); sponges soaked in any of the above (unhygienic but possibly more effective); sheaths/condoms (uncomfortable and associated with prostitutes and venereal disease). ³³

The adult female participants in Outback House were obviously not going to have to deal with childbirth but both contraception and menstruation were aspects of healthcare that would almost certainly have to be addressed.

An account of medicines and their uses

The following list of medicaments (see Table 1) available to 1860s outback settlers, together with directions for usage, was supplied to the producers of Outback House. The medicaments reflect the crossover from domestic/nutrition to medicinal/therapeutic evident in William Buchan's Domestic Medicine, ³⁴ one of the first books to bring together aetiology, hygiene and therapeutics under the banner of self-help. This work was first published in the mideighteenth century but went through numerous reprints throughout the nineteenth century and would certainly have been a familiar reference work in colonial New South Wales. A less medical and more domestic approach is found in Mrs Isabella Beeton's Book of Household Management, ³⁵ which although first published in book form in the early 1860s, nevertheless made use of recipes and remedies either already published or in common usage. ³⁶

Laudanum, opium, chlorodyne, calomel, and castor oil were therapeutics suggested by pharmacists and included in most squatters' medicine chests. These were considered to be the strongest of therapeutics, used on the basis of purging for plethora or stimulating for debility. Beyond such medicines, there were other necessities recommended for an 1860s outback house: measuring glasses, syringes, lancets for bleeding or vaccination, bandages, tourniquets, oiled silk and lint, sponges, cotton wool, splints, vaccine matter, trusses, and catheters. It will be obvious from this list that nineteenth-century outback colonists were expected to be capable of vaccinating, bleeding, and even performing surgical operations without professional medical aid.

Table 1: Commonly used medicaments recommended to nineteenth-century colonists (Sources: Finche's Guide Book to the Squatter's Medicine Chest and Hogg's The Domestick Medical and Surgical Guide.)

In an attempt to have the Outback House participants rely on authentic nineteenth-century medicine, we procured the following bush medicines from commercial outlets for actual use in the show:

• Arnica cream [Martin & Pleasance Herbal Creams]—for bruises, sprains etc as directed on jar

• Friars' Balsam Compound Benzoin Tincture BP [Gold Cross]—for inhaling with chest problems, as directed on bottle

• Pure Essential Oil of Peppermint [The Oil Garden]—inhaled for headaches as directed on bottle

• Citric Acid Monohydrate BP [generic product]—for making anti scorbutic drinks

• Slippery Elm Powder [Select Naturals]—added to juice or water, for stomach upsets, as directed on packet

• Senna Leaves [Select Foods Originals]—infusion of senna for digestion and constipation

• Epsom Salts [Sigma]—laxative, as directed on packet

The inclusion of a medicament on this list was dependent on certification by a medical practitioner as being 'safe' to use; the possibility of truly reflecting nineteenth-century bush medicine and self-help thereby limited by insurance and Occupational Health and Safety issues. Information specifically for nineteenth-century colonists was available in the numerous medical guides for emigrants—one of the earliest being Jabez Hogg's The Domestic Medical and Surgical Guide for the Nursery, the Cottage and the Bush: Giving the Best Advice in the Absence of a Physician or Surgeon. ³⁷ This work was published in 1853 and was intended to be used in conjunction with the medical chest provided by the government, in order that new arrivals should stay as healthy as possible and not be an economic burden to the colony. Publications such as this were intended to give practical advice to those living in isolated situations and included sections on: suitable food and drink, medicines and related conditions, emergency procedures, and the effects of climate. Further advice about how to use the contents of a bush medicine chest came from such books as the previously noted Finch's Guide Book to the Squatters' Medicine Chest, ³⁸ although it was not published until 1868. Frequently this type of book was sold by pharmacists in order to encourage the purchasing of the chests, rather than having colonists simply buy the medicaments separately and rather more cheaply.

As noted above, mainly due to current OHS regulations, in Outback House the medicaments available to deal with health problems were plainly not going to reflect those recommended to actual nineteenth-century colonists; nor would they truly reflect nineteenth-century perceptions of how the body functioned. Their purpose was rather to provide possibly effective and definitely harmless therapeutics to use in cases of minor sickness or accident. In more major events, twenty-first-century medicine intervened, as we shall see.

A description of advising the participants in the show, or: The trainer trained

After the more theoretical side of the session, as described above and designed to introduce the participants to the nineteenth-century colonial 'mind set,' there was some practical 'training' in which it turned out that the 'trainer' learned as much as the trainees. Following are descriptions of a selection of the practical exercises.

(1) The menstrual pad: As has been noted, commercial sanitary pads were not available in the 1860s and so these had to be fashioned out of material to hand. Assuming that flannelette and gauze would be suitable, if not always available, these materials were purchased (and this led to a fascinating discussion with a stunned city shop assistant as to what the material was to be used for), and the trainer had attempted to construct a pad before the training session, in the privacy of her bedroom. However she had quickly come to the realisation that extensive instruction and considerable sewing ability would be needed for the finished product to be both aesthetically pleasing and practical to use. ³⁹ No wonder then that the better-off women, with the benefit of money to buy suitable, comfortable material and the services of a lady's maid to do the sewing, managed menstruation more efficiently; and no wonder that even the less impressive 'pads' were used over and over again, given the time consuming nature of their construction. Fortunately for the instruction of the participants the (male) costume designer had put the trainer to shame by constructing a magnificent pad of the 'boater' variety, ⁴⁰ although it might be thought that the trainer's home made version would have been more akin to that actually used in an outback household in the 1860s.

What kind of protection the female participants actually used during the production was never discussed in the televised program (for reasons discussed below) although dealing with menstruation was the subject of a fairly frank to-camera segment on Regency House Party. ⁴¹

(2) The bread poultice: The instructions for making a bread poultice are to be found in any household management or domestic medicine book of the period; for example, the previously noted works of Mrs Beeton or William Buchan. This indicates the presumed self-sufficiency of the nineteenth-century household, the crossover from medicinal to domestic and the status of the housewife or domestic servants as primary care-givers in health matters. The 'recipe' (see Table 1) for the poultice sounds simple and straightforward; however, so as to ensure a seamless demonstration to the participants, the trainer had a test run in her kitchen at home. Despite modern equipment, it rapidly became obvious that, yet again, some skill would be needed in order to make a useable, effective and comforting poultice, and that the level of skill and experience needed had been vastly underestimated.

Perhaps due to the above problems a bread poultice never made an appearance on Outback House.

(3) Lavender Water: Although it might have been possible to buy some kind of commercial preparations from the Hawker who visited the house, ⁴² lavender water could be made fairly easily in the kitchen provided suitable ingredients were available. The mixture as given in the recipe, although this time easy to prepare (see Table 1), proved to be not to everyone's liking and rather more headache-provoking than dispelling. It was decided that some adjusting would be necessary and no doubt everyone had their own version. No version of any sort was used on screen, again possibly due to the idea being more attractive than the reality.

Having looked at individual practical issues, we will now go on to examine what use was made of the advice given to the producers and participants in the series as it went to air.

The representation of nineteenth-century bush medicine in the television series

How then did the series deal with issues of health and disease on an isolated bush property one hot and steamy summer in mid-nineteenth-century New South Wales? What were the attitudes and actions of the characters and how were these depicted both implicitly and explicitly? How closely did they reflect the 'reality' of 1861? Why did many of the practical aspects of nineteenth-century life in which the participants were 'trained' never make it to the screen? This section will describe what actually happened on screen, together with some comments about what did not. It will then compare these situations with some first-hand accounts of medicine in the bush in the 1860s.

The case of the discarded clothes

It would have been obvious to all but the most casual viewer that, very shortly after arrival at the house, most of the female occupants had 'adjusted and varied their outfits' ⁴³ by removing tight corsets, cutting sleeves and, in some cases, taking off outer garments altogether. This divesting of garments had also happened in the previous Australian series The Colony in which the female participants were found to be 'cutting up their costumes to make them more practical' while the book of this series comments somewhat confusingly that '[w]e wanted them to be themselves.' ⁴⁴ The book of Outback House was less sanguine about this development, noting that this was not something that women of the 1860s would have even considered doing. ⁴⁵ However, the disapproval evinced in the book was based on the rigid class and social mores of the period and ignored the rather more important mid-nineteenth-century attitude to health, noted in an earlier section and explained to the participants, that saw the removal of outer garments as a reckless exposure to variations in temperature, ⁴⁶ and thus a danger to health. Plainly this 'mindset' had not taken hold of the participants' consciousness; or to put it another way, the participants failed to colonise the mid-nineteenth-century mindset.

The case of the recalcitrant horse

On several occasions during the Outback House series there were falls from horses, hardly surprising considering how integral horse riding was to life on an outback property. On one occasion a child fell from her horse and landed on her head, causing suspected concussion. An ambulance promptly arrived and the little girl was transported to hospital in Dubbo for observation. ⁴⁷

Image 2: An ambulance arrives at Outback House. (Photograph by Ron Ekkel. Courtesy of the photographer.)

Plainly in twenty-first-century terms this was a sensible precaution but not only was the appearance of the ambulance a strange intrusion into the 'reality' of the supposed nineteenth century, the opportunity was missed to comment on what would actually have happened in 1861. Similarly, and equally anachronistically, an ambulance appeared on screen when one of the men injured his leg and he too was whisked off to hospital, a strange way of filming an accident in a series that claimed to be at least attempting to depict the world of 1861. ⁴⁸

The case of the governess' stomach

The first governess for the children of the house came down with 'gastric infection and fever' a few weeks after her arrival. She later claimed that her illness was exacerbated by having to use the unpleasant paperless privy. Consequent dehydration caused her removal, also by an ambulance, shown on-screen, to hospital in Dubbo.

Image 3: Nineteenth-century best medical practice? (Photograph by Ron Ekkel. Courtesy of the photographer.)

Evidence from the 1860s

What then would have actually happened in cases, such as those described above, on an outback property in the 1860s? Several sources of evidence should serve to address this question, at least one of which was known to the producers of Outback House. Rachel Henning came to the Australian colonies from England in the 1850s and it is from her copious and detailed letters home ⁴⁹ that a reasonably accurate picture of middle class squatter life can be gained. We learn that the medicaments considered in any way to be effective were 'quinine, rhubarb, castor oil, laudanum, and blue pills' ⁵⁰ —none of which, as has been noted, made an appearance in Outback House. Moreover the reaction to a 'fever' of any sort would not have been an attempt at removal to hospital but rather the taking of a medicament of choice ⁵¹ or bleeding and purging, both of which, it was considered, could be performed just as well at home, without a doctor present. This approach is confirmed by reading the section in Finch's Guide Book on 'Accidents,' in which colonists are warned to curb their enthusiasm for indiscriminate self-bleeding used as a 'lowering' treatment 'since emetics and purgatives with calomel will frequently effect every object.' ⁵² Finch further states that there is 'no medicine we are more indebted to' than calomel. ⁵³

A further source of information, the case histories published in the New South Wales Medical Gazette, ⁵⁴ stress that the journeys on horseback to isolated properties were often not worth the danger involved in the doctor getting there or in transporting the patient back over rough terrain to his house or a local hospital. ⁵⁵ Sickness and injury therefore would in general have been treated on the property, not such a bad thing in a period when cross-infection was a greater danger to patients than their own infections or injuries. Nevertheless there are some accounts of doctors braving the outback conditions to treat patients, although how much these reflected normal day-to-day experience has to be questioned, given that the accounts in the Gazette were an accumulation of some ten years and also tended to be used by doctors as a not-very-subtle form of advertising. Accidents such as compound fractures, ruptures, and spear wounds; and conditions such as strictures, tumours, and fistulas were reported as at least being 'relieved' ⁵⁶ by doctors performing their procedures on kitchen tables and then staying for a few days to watch over the progress or otherwise of the patient.

These approaches to nineteenth-century medical care could have been the subject of voice-over commentary, as could the many practical aspects of the female participants' 'training' that did not receive air time when the program was televised. Part of the reason was presumably the pressure of competing aspects of nineteenth-century life, many of which made for more compelling viewing and listening than aspects of health and feminine hygiene; part of the reason was also, presumably, privacy and modesty. However it is interesting to note that, while the participants were shielded from prying viewers' eyes in their nineteenth-century personas, there was no such reticence about filming their twenty-first-century shedding of outer garments, confusion of intention rearing its head yet again.

There was only one case of sickness and two accidents in the Outback House series, a fairly good outcome for several months' 'living' in the 1860s. Again, as has been noted, no one could reasonably expect the actual treatment of these problems to be along nineteenth-century lines, nevertheless, in all cases (except for a brief mention in the case of the leg) the opportunity was missed to even 'depict,' for the benefit of the camera and with a voice-over, what would 'really' have happened in 1861. The frequent appearance of the ambulance may have served to reassure the audience that no human beings were harmed in the making of the program (there had been much concern voiced over the treatment of the sheep) but it also served yet again to highlight the program's confusion of attitudes and aims.

Conclusions

What is one to think as a professional historian involved with reality television? Indeed, one might ask very similar questions to those supposedly asked in 'reality history' itself: what was the nature of the lived experience and how did the experience seem with the benefit of hindsight? These concluding remarks consist of a meta-analytic, after-the-fact participant's reflections.

Firstly, then, a consideration of the aims of Outback House and whether they were achieved. The book of the series tells us that Outback House was 'created primarily to entertain and interest people who watched it on television'; however it was also hoped that 'by re-creating accurately what life would have been like on a squatter's sheep station in 1861, the series would be able to test many assumptions about the period that are widely accepted as fact.' ⁵⁷ Confusingly, however, on the very next page we read that 'the basic question that the…; series hoped to answer… was how twenty-first-century people would deal with the primitiveness of life in the outback in 1861'. ⁵⁸ From the beginning then, the aims of the series would seem to have had the seeds of their own destruction within them: life was not created 'accurately' because of the way in which twenty-first-century people (including both the participants and the producers) coped with the primitive conditions and attended practical and safety concerns. Moreover, these were twenty-first-century people with perceptions and assumptions that could be of no period but their own, as illustrated, for example, by the horror evinced at the danger to life and limb involved in having to use the 'long drop toilet' instead of being grateful for having one at all. In looking backwards at the supposedly 'primitive' conditions of the 1860s, these 'colonists' of 2005 were doing something very different to the real colonists for whom the living conditions in 1861 would have been, if perhaps somewhat more rough and ready than they were used to in England, at least not totally out-of-time.

So much for the explicit aims: let us set them aside and ask in what sense some kind of 'historical experiment' has been performed, regardless, that is, of what the producers thought they were doing. In one sense, the parameters of the experiment involved recreating, as authentically as possible, an 1860s setting into which 'laboratory' subjects were placed and their behaviour observed. Of course, these subjects were not accustomed to such a setting, nor had they confronted such problems or tasks before; and so it was an experiment of a kind with an uncertain outcome. But was it an experiment 'in' history; or just an experiment with historical conditions? Clearly, it is only possible to show how twenty-first-century people with twenty-first-century sensibilities cope with the experiment. A dramatic example of this, previously noted, is from The Colony: the way the women, in reaction to the fact that their long dresses were cumbersome and kept catching fire, made their skirts into shorts and thus 'collapsed two hundred years in the evolution of women's clothing into a few months.' ⁵⁹

If we describe such experiments as attempts to 'colonise the past,' the colonists might as well be from another planet so far as their sensibilities are concerned. Therefore, what we have here is a lesson in historiography rather than in history; nineteenth-century problems found twenty-first-century solutions. However, in that the experience changed the lives of the participants, as many have claimed it did, it could also be said to have been an experiment of a nonhistorical kind; again, one that tells us about current concerns, because in the past people were clearly not constantly comparing their lot with some unknown and unknowable future state. ⁶⁰ Further, the television audience, as observers of (a highly edited and select version of) this experiment in 'colonising the past,' don't fare any better. They also are engaging in the same kind of comparative exercise as the participants, only without the benefit of being on location, and therefore even any pretence of 'returning' to the past.

On a more positive note, while Outback House may not have fully and accurately provided the viewing public with a lesson in nineteenth-century outback life, there were lessons to be learned for the text-focussed academic historian forced to consider some more practical matters of the past. In his article 'Bringing the Past to the Small Screen' (2002), Taylor Downing notes that academic historians 'should be providing a bridge between the academy and the mass television audienc…; helping to bring some of the new understandings, the new insights, the new interpretations, the new narratives that professional historians are working on' ⁶¹ to the viewing public; however, while the attempt of one of us to do just this in the context of Outback House may have been only moderately successful, the influence of working on a 'living experiment,' on that particular academic, turned out to be seminal concerning her approaches to the past. Being forced to relate academic theory and research to practice and to actually produce (at least a version of) the artefacts, about which one only usually writes, alerts one to a totally different appreciation of circumstances in the past.

As historians, then, we have to ask ourselves searching questions about apparent disconnections between theory and practice. How can our theories be correct if our assumptions about the practices are untested? So perhaps ironically, although the involvement of academic historians in 'reality television' may be problematic as far as the finished product (the program) is concerned, this same involvement will eventually and actually contribute more to the production of 'real' academic history, even if the academic historian also, finally, fails to 'colonise the past.'

Notes

University of New South Wales

^1. Richard J. Evans, "Prologue: What is History?—Now," in What is History Now? edited by David Cannadine (Hampshire and New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2002), 11.

^2. For example, the proceedings of the conference of the Institute of Historical Research, held in London in 2002: David Cannadine, ed., History and the Media (Hampshire and New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2004).

^3. There is now an extensive literature devoted to this genre. See, for example, Su Holmes and Deborah Jermyn eds., Understanding Reality Television (London and New York: Routledge, 2004).

^4. Su Holmes and Deborah Jermyn, "Introduction," in Holmes and Jermyn, 4.

^5. Ibid., 5.

^6. As discussed in such early works as: E.H. Carr, What is History? (London: MacMillan, 1961) and G.R. Elton, The Practice of History (Sydney: Sydney University Press, 1967); and more recently in such works as: Cannadine; and Beverley Southgate, What is History For? (London and New York: Routledge, 2005).

^7. Taylor Downing, "Bringing the Past to the Small Screen," in Cannadine, 12.

^8. This approach was taken by the participants in Regency House Party. See the Regency House Party website: http://www.channel4.com/history/.

^9. For different versions of public history, see Graeme Davison, "Paradigms of Public History," in Packaging the Past: Public Histories, edited by John Rickard and Peter Spearritt (Brunswick: Melbourne University Press, 1991), 4-15.

^10. See Margaret Anderson, "Selling the Past: History in Museums in the 1990s," in Rickard and Spearritt, 13041.

^11. For example, see comments about the alteration of clothing in Belinda Gibbon, The Colony: The Book From the Popular SBS Living History Series (Milsons Point, NSW: Random House Australia, 2005), 355.

^12. See the publication from Outback House: Bernard Lynam, Outback House (Sydney: ABC Books, 2005).

^13. For a good general account of this approach, see Roy Porter, The Greatest Benefit to Mankind (London: HarperCollins, 1997) and Lawrence I. Conrad et al., The Western Medical Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).

^14. For an excellent discussion of this approach to disease, see Charles Rosenberg, "The Therapeutic Revolution," Perspectives in Biology and Medicine 20 (1977): 485506.

^15. For a thorough overview of epidemiology in Australia, see J.H.L. Cumpston, Health and Disease in Australia: A History (Canberra: AGPS, 1989).

^16. Immigration from other parts of the United Kingdom was less encouraged.

^17. W. Stewart, Health in Australia and How to Preserve It (fragment of pamphlet, Geelong, 1861), 38. Also James Kilgour, Effect of the Climate of Australia Upon the European Constitution in Health and Disease (Geelong: William Vale, 1855).

^18. Ibid., 65, 104. For a general discussion of this topic, see Graham A. Edwards, "Sunstroke and Insanity in Nineteenth Century Australia," in Reflections on Medical History and Health in Australia, edited by H. Attwood and G. Kenny (Melbourne: Australian Society for the History of Medicine, 1987), 3542.

^19. A. Ross, "The Climate of Australia Viewed in Relation to Health," New South Wales Medical Gazette 1 (187071): 164.

^20. C. Finch, Finch's Guidebook to the Squatter's Medicine Chest: Containing Directions for the Use of Medicines, Practical Observations on the Treatment of Diseases and Accidents and a Variety of Useful Prescriptions (Sydney: F. Cunningham, Steam Machine Printer, Pitt Street, 1868).

^21. G. Fullerton, The Family Medical Guide (Sydney: Joseph Cook and Son, 1875).

^22. J. Bolton Emmerson, "Quackery in New South Wales," The Lancet (April 5, 1879): 501.

^23. "Dearth of Country Medical Men," New South Wales Medical Gazette 5 (18745): 381. For a moving description of the tribulations of a bush doctor, see Henry Handel Richardson, The Fortunes of Richard Mahony (London: Heinemann, 1930).

^24. "The Proposed Medical Bill," New South Wales Medical Gazette 3 (18723): 76.

^25. See Michael J. Thearle, "Domestic Medicine in Colonial Queensland," in New Perspectives on the History of Medicine, edited by H. Attwood, R. Gillespie, and M. Lewis (Melbourne: University of Melbourne and the Australian Society of the History of Medicine, 1990), 12142.

^26. P. Shuttle & P. Redgrove, The Wise Wound: Menstruation and Everywoman (London: Victor Gollancz Ltd., 1979).

^27. For example, the cases of Constance Kent and Lizzie Borden in which stains that might have been menstrual blood went largely unexamined due to the reticence of male police officers. See Bernard Taylor, Cruelly Murdered (UK: Grafton books, 1989); and Victoria Lincoln, A Private Disgrace: Lizzie Borden by Daylight (London: Victor Gollancz Ltd., 1968).

^28. There are very few books that address the history of this topic but useful information can be found on the following websites: http://www.mum.org/ and http://www.powerhousemuseum.com/rags/ .

^29. This was an issue that was discussed in an episode of The Edwardian Country House. See the website: http://www.channel4.com/history/microsites/C/countryhouse/index.html.

^30. For a discussion in the Australian context see Jennifer Hagger, Australian Colonial Medicine (Adelaide: Rigby Ltd., 1997), 1323.

^31. W.H. Jenkins, The Family Medical Index or What to do in Cases of Emergency (Melbourne: F.F. Bailliere Publisher, 1874). It was noted on the cover of this book that it was 'Written expressly for the colonies to give help where the services of the medical man cannot be obtained.'

^32. Angus McLaren, A History of Contraception from Antiquity to the Present Day (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990). For accounts of female experiences living in the Australian outback see autobiographical accounts in Mary Gilmore, Old Days, Old Ways: A Book of Recollections (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1953) and Myrtle Rose White, No Roads Go By (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1953) and the grim fictional accounts in Barbara Baynton, Bush Studies (London: Duckworth, 1902).

^33. See Angus McLaren, Birth Control in Nineteenth-Century England (London: Croom Helm, 1978) and Hera Cook, The Long Sexual Revolution: English Women, Sex and Contraception, 18001975 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).

^34. William Buchan, Domestic Medicine or A Treatise on the Prevention and Cure of Diseases by Regimen and Simple Medicine (London: W.Strahan, T.Cadell, 1779).

^35. Originally published by her husband Samuel Beeton in 24 monthly parts 185961; first published bound edition 1861 (London: S.O. Beeton, 1861).

^36. See Kathryn Hughes, The Short Life and Long Times of Mrs Beeton (London: Fourth Estate, 2005).

^37. London: Ingram, Cooke and Co., 1853.

^38. See note 20.

^39. Not all nineteenth-century females were experts with the needle. See the miseries of Jo March in Louisa May Alcott's Little Women or of Katy Carr in Susan Coolidge's What Katy Did, both published in the 1860s.

^40. Lynam, 136.

^41. See the Regency House Party website: http://www.channel4.com/history/

^42. Lynam, 100; and see also Peter J. Phillips, Kill or Cure (Victoria: Greenhouse Publications, 1984), 7398.

^43. Lynam, 89.

^44. Gibbon, 355.

^45. Lynam, 89.

^46. Stewart, 10.

^47. Lynam, 52.

^48. Ibid., 78.

^49. Published as D. Adams, ed., The Letters of Rachel Henning (London: Penguin Books, 1969).

^50. Ibid., 162. 'Blue pills' contained mercury as their main ingredient and were taken for a host of ailments including apoplexy, worms, tuberculosis, toothache, and constipation. Little wonder they were a staple medicament in the nineteenth-century outback.

^51. 'Annie believes in castor oil and I generally consider that laudanum will be soothing,' (ibid., 162).

^52. Finch, 44.

^53. Ibid., 8.

^54. New South Wales Medical Gazette, published in Sydney from 187075 but containing cases from the 1860s, as current material was not sufficient to fill each edition. For a discussion of this situation see P.S. Hardy, Surgical Spirit: Listerism and the Medical Profession in New South Wales, 18671889 (unpublished PhD thesis, University of New South Wales, 1990).

^55. Of which, counter intuitively, in the 1860s there were possibly more than today; see A. Roberts, "Hospital Accommodation," Journal and Proceedings of the Royal Society of New South Wales, 710 (18736): 25.

^56. Hardy, 232338.

⁵⁷ Lynam, 8.

^58. Ibid., 9.

^59. Gibbon, 355.

^60. There was a more thoughtful discussion of this problem in Regency House Party (see note 41).

^61. Downing, 16.

Table 1: Commonly used medicaments recommended to nineteenth-century colonists. (Sources: Finch's Guide Book to the Squatter's Medicine Chest and Hogg's The Domestic Medical and Surgical Guide.

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Colonising the Past? History, Medicine, and Reality Television

Notes

Colonising the Past?

History, Medicine, and Reality Television