What we can learn from our Australian colleagues

20 December 2013 – Morgen Young

I have long admired the Australia Council of Professional Historians Associations (ACPHA). It promotes the profession of history and the work of its members by keeping consultants’ registers, offering employment services, and maintaining a scale of fees. I have often wondered if some of these benefits could be replicated in the United States by NCPH.

Members of the Victoria Chapter of the ACPHA meet.  Photo credit: Morgen Young

While visiting Melbourne in November, I had an opportunity to meet with members of the ACPHA’s Victoria Chapter. I related some general issues facing public history in America, from our current overabundance of educational programs, and the problems arising from it, to the impact of the Great Recession on employment. Our Australian colleagues face the opposite situation. With the closure of Monash University’s masters in public history program earlier this year, Australia now has no public history programs. At the same time, I was fascinated to learn what the ACPHA is doing to secure employment for public historians, consultants especially. I hope that we might be able to emulate some or all pieces of their program.

At the meeting, members shared their recent projects. Scroll through the November 13^th entries on the @PHAVic Twitter feed and you can read more about them. Eighty-five percent of those in attendance identified themselves as consulting historians. They were producing oral histories, books, e-books, and other commissioned histories. What struck me as different from my experiences as a consulting historian in Oregon is that they frequently work together, collaborating on specific projects or forming permanent business partnerships. This collaborative nature was so refreshing to me. In my experience, I have found myself more often than not competing with my colleagues, often in bidding wars. ACPHA members generally have been able to avoid such competition because they operate according to a schedule of fees developed by their organization, which you can review. Fees are based on education and years of experience. A prospective client has a framework for understanding how much a historian will cost across a range of education and experience and, armed with this information, can select a historian that fits with the project’s budget. In my practice, I have observed that a client will select a historian based on fees, unrelated to either education or experience and so underbidding is rife.

In addition to the scale of fees, the Victoria Chapter offers an employment and professional development service. A member of the chapter currently maintains this service. As part of her responsibilities, she shares various history job announcements and professional development opportunities and liaises with potential clients who are looking to employ a historian. The ACPHA directly advocates for its members, working with those outside the field of history to understand the value of historians.

The author stands on the steps of the Shrine of Remembrance, with the Melbourne skyline in the background.  Photo credit:  Morgen Young

As the NCPH and its Consultants Committee look ahead to a new year and work to revamp the Consultants List, we would do well to look at how the ACPHA is benefiting our colleagues Down Under.

~ Morgen Young is the owner of Alder, LLC, a public history consulting company. Her work focuses on historical research, writing, exhibit development and curation, oral history, and photography.