Interview with Paul Ham

Interviewer: What do you think is the role of memory in history?

Paul Ham: Well, memory has to obviously play a crucial role in any historian's job and in writing history. The quality of the memory is the key thing it seems to me. The quality of the memory of the people you're interviewing; who were there; their judgments are important and their understanding of what happened. The memory however is a very fluid and somewhat susceptible process. Susceptible in the sense that it gets twisted; it gets changed over time; it is subject to prejudice as time wears on; people get a different opinion or idea of what they experienced. Some soldiers at the same contact, or the same operation, tell different versions ... I've sat with four soldiers and they all have completely different accounts of what happened and they get into a big argument about it. So the memory at that very basic level, at that level of remembering what happened, is vital to my job but trying to get it right means seeking out several memories. Don't trust one memory, seek several memories.

But I think the question is obviously broader than that. It's also what is the role of memory, of my memory of the things that I've experienced in my own life perhaps, and how that impinges on my understanding of events, and to what extent I'm willing to allow information that I'm gleaning for my book to challenge my memory. I'm not simply saying memory of Vietnam or Kokoda – I wasn't there obviously, I was too young – but my memory of what I've learnt about it. I may have learnt a great deal of things, read a great deal of things and come to the subject with preconceived notions. That is my memory working: here is my idea of what happened.

How willing then am I to challenge my own memory, of my own impression of what happened? So that's where memory plays another role in writing history. I think that, in terms of reading the books that are written by other people, you're dealing with their memories of their material, their memories perhaps of their experiences and certainly, at one remove, the memory of the people that they've interviewed. So you can see how labyrinthine this becomes and I'm deeply skeptical of everyone's memory, my own included, but value what it has done in informing me in absence of all the other information. As I said the earlier stages taking us through the various levels of research and memory as given to me by my interviewees is down the list, down the priority list for that reason. Because it's extraordinary to see that a general, whose memory you like to trust, but it is also extraordinarily prey to his own idea of his place in history, his own unit; a junior officer – his company's place in history as opposed to another company’s. So human memory is supple, it's risky, it's vague; and yet what comes to the fore, over years and years, is my unit's success, my triumph. It is prone to the human ego – it has to be – and the ego is always clawing away at the memory and taking the chunks of the memory that we want and reinterpreting that for another agenda. That's why memory is a crucial but you have to seek out, as I said before, so many memories.