An evening with Ambeth Ocampo: About heroes, hoaxes and history

The ANU Philippines Institute hosted renowned Filipino historian Professor Ambeth Ocampo for a Distinguished Guest Lecture on 22 September 2025, captivating audiences with wit, depth, and insight into how Filipinos remember and reinvent their past.

Opening with a striking question: “Why are all our heroes old? Why are all our heroes male? Why are all our heroes dead?” Professor Ocampo reflected on how the Philippines tends to view heroism in the past tense, immortalising figures in statues, textbooks, and even currency. Through a vivid presentation of changing Philippine banknotes, he demonstrated how national icons such as Manuel L. Quezon have been visually “rejuvenated” over time, revealing how national memory reshapes heroes to fit idealised narratives of youth, vitality, and sacrifice while overlooking the complexities of their lives.

He reminded the audience that many Filipino heroes, including José Rizal, achieved their most significant contributions before turning forty, yet are often remembered as static symbols of the past rather than as living inspirations for the present.

Framing his talk around what he called “two heroes—one positive, one negative,” Ocampo posed a provocative contrast:

One is José Rizal, who tried to uncover the Philippine past, and the other is José E. Marco, who did not have to uncover the past—there was none. So he created it for us. So what makes one guy good and the other guy bad?

Ocampo explored Rizal’s annotated edition of Antonio de Morga’s Sucesos de las Islas Filipinas, describing it as the first history of the Philippines written by a Filipino from a Filipino perspective. He noted that while Rizal’s work blurred the line between history and propaganda, it was also an act of reclamation, an attempt to write back against colonial narratives and imagine a national identity rooted in pride rather than shame.

In contrast, Ocampo recounted the story of José E. Marco, the forger behind fabricated historical texts such as the Code of Kalantiaw. With humour and meticulous archival insight, he detailed how Marco deceived scholars and collectors by selling “typed transcriptions” of supposed originals, some of which reached major institutions such as the Newberry Library in Chicago before being exposed as fakes. The episode, Ocampo noted, highlights how easily the boundary between history and invention can blur when societies are eager to fill the gaps in their past.

Blending archival gossip, sharp critique, and humour, Professor Ocampo closed by reminding the audience that history is not static. It is, he said, a living dialogue between the past and the present, one that challenges us not only to remember our heroes, but to question why we choose to remember them the way we do.