I MUST congratulate Mount Alexander Shire on the decision to implement the thematic history project.
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Our council states that thematic history differs from the usual chronological history as it views the past through themes to build a multi-faceted understanding of how we have arrived where we are, and who we are today.
People develop a "sense of place" through experience and knowledge of a particular area.
A sense of belonging to a place emerges through knowledge of the history, geography and geology of an area, its flora and fauna, the legends of a place, and a growing sense of the land and its history after living there for a time.
This method of recording history will be of great benefit to our community and will be ongoing so future generations can understand the stories of people past and present.
With modern technology we can all become citizen historians, newspapers are being digitalised by the national and state libraries museums and art galleries and other historic collections are becoming available online.
An amazing array of genealogy sites are now available to record family trees and trace our families back to their country of origin.
We can do our research from the comfort of our own homes,we no longer have to visit musty archives and state libraries to do research,social media is also playing a major role in this revolution.
I urge all people who have a genuine interest in the real history of our shire to get involved and help the project evolve naturally into an asset that we will all be very proud of.
We can now visualise that history can also include emotions,feelings and imagination. We can now reject the sanitised pap that historians have dished up to us.
"All history should be public history, for even the most challenging ideas, when expressed with clarity, can engage the intelligent non-specialist."
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