Archiving Loss

Holding Places for Difficult Memories

Martine Hawkes

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780367821098
• eBook ISBN: 9781317103325
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Drawing together many stories from the archives of difficult events and volatile histories, Archiving Loss: Holding Places for Difficult Memories asks how we might cut and walk a path for memory, loss, and silence in the archive. The difficult events discussed in this book include state responses to refugees, events of genocide, alongside other less documented pockets of trauma, violence, and loss. This book describes the archives whose language and logic have shaped our ways we remember and respond to difficult events and the ways in which we expect memory and loss to be coherent, credible, and lead to clear conclusions. In asking what is missing and what is found in the archives of difficult events this book argues for the necessity of looking more closely at other ways of remembering loss and archiving memory.

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Part I

The archive

The archive sustains many of society’s ways of coming to terms with difficult, traumatic, and violent events, subjects, memories, and histories. These ways include evidence provision, activity documentation, justice or accountability processes, historical sources, national and cultural identity construction (and destruction), and the structure of stories told about the event. If archives are the sites from which justice is sought, and narratives of difficult events are constructed, we must ask ourselves what type of information might be found in an archive and what might not be in an archive. To answer these questions, I begin by seeking to understand what an archive is and what it is not.

The contents of an archive might be textual, including documents such as letters or ledgers. But it also might include audio, film, photographs, and other objects. Archives are not a random collection, but are instead composed of objects retained for some purpose. Even if we take the third drawer down in your kitchen or your wardrobe, a decision has been taken at some point to keep the contents, and all are archives of something. So, your kitchen drawer may be an archive of bills received in the last year or things—elastic bands and Allen keys—that may come in handy one day. Your wardrobe may not only be an archive of your clothing—work uniforms, the too-tight shoes that you cannot bring yourself to recycle, the dress that hold memories of an event or person—but of sweat, perfume, wear, and repair work.

As Rebecca Comay (2002) writes in her collection of archive philosophy, “What isn’t an archive these days? . . . In these memory-obsessed times—haunted by the demands of history, overwhelmed by the dizzying possibilities of new technologies—the archive presents itself as the ultimate horizon of experience” (12). In understanding the archive, we also need to know that there exist impossible archives; archives that do not yet exist or which exist in the places where we do not expect to find the collected memories of a community, event, or individual.

Dubravka Ugrešić’s 1999 novel The Museum of Unconditional Surrender opens with the description of an archive. This archive is displayed in a glass case at the Berlin Zoo. It illustrates the broad definition of an archive as being any space containing the primary source documents and objects of an event, a person, a moment, or community. In the glass case are the objects found in the stomach of Roland, a walrus who died at the zoo on 21 August 1961. Ugrešić describes these objects:

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. . . a hair grip, a wooden pencil, a child’s plastic water pistol, a plastic knife, sunglasses, a little chain, a spring (small), a rubber ring, a parachute (child’s toy), a steel chain about 18 ins in length, four nails (large), a green plastic car, a metal comb, a plastic badge, a small doll, a beer can (Pilsner, half-pint), a box of matches, a baby’s shoe . . .

(1999, xi)

Outside of an archive, these objects may seem unconnected. In this glass case, the objects are united in meaning as they were swallowed by the same walrus, in the same city, at the same time. Maintained in an archive, the objects also take on other meanings as they begin to look old-fashioned or disappear from ordinary usage and become artefacts of Berlin of 1961. Ugrešić writes: “If the reader feels there are no meaningful or firm connections between [the chapters that follow], let him be patient: the connections will establish themselves of their own accord” (1999, xi). In the archive, we must be patient and open to surprise.

Does it matter that this archive has emerged from stomach of a walrus? Is that not too private and organic to be an archive? Laura Miller (2006) argues for a revision of the metaphors that are used to describe archives; that archives should be described as mnemonics, not as “archives of memory” (107). The archive, whether it is a sandstone building decked out in national flags in your capital city or the stomach of a walrus in the Berlin Zoo, should act as an aid to memory. I write ‘should’ to recall that these are governed spaces with decisions made about what will be forgotten and what will be remembered; about what memories will be destabilised or preserved.

In addition to the space of the archive, what is a valid record or artefact within an archive changes with time and across disciplines. For example, a cultural historian may construct a narrative from a collection of bus tickets and travel passes or the way that you order (or not) your email inbox. A natural scientist may use archival collections of rocks with handwritten labels or a living archive of birds circulating in an area.

Let us begin by imagining an archive. Rather than the contents of a walrus’s stomach, we will go slowly and begin instead with a place that is more widely accepted as an archive. This archive is the Public Record Office Victoria in Melbourne, Australia. This is the archive of the State Government of Victoria, which holds records dating from the mid-1830s, just before the establishment of Victoria as a colony, onward.

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The Public Record Office Victoria holds what we might traditionally expect to find in an archive containing the records of a colonial city or country. It contains state records on topics ranging from adoption and wardship, to ships and shipping, to prisoners and convicts. It contains maps and plans from which you can see the progress of European settlement in Victoria. The records held by the Public Record Office Victoria are largely paper documents.

An archive might exist in a physical location, but it might also be digitised and available online. Decisions will have been made about where the archive will be, how it will be preserved, and how it will be made available to a wider user base (if it is to be made available). Following Joan M. Schwartz and Terry Cook in their arguments that archival institutions “are not some pristine storehouses historical documentation that has piled up, but a reflection of and often justification for the society that creates them” (Schwartz and Cook 2002, 12), we come closer to understanding these sites as active places where decisions have been made. I pause here to flag that I also include museums in my definition of an archive and will be discussing them in this book. Museums are collections of primary data, mainly objects, which have been curated for display. They are also spaces which hold objects that have not been selected for display. The power of selection—of what is in and what is out—is very much at work in the museum as an archive space. These spaces are crucial in shaping public understandings of the natural world, of anthropological narratives, and of the philosophy of knowledge.

An archive places limits and procedures on its accessibility and on what it will and will not contain or make available. For example, the Reading Room of the Public Record Office Victoria is open to the public on Monday to Friday from 10:00 to 16:30 and on the second and last Saturday of every month. It closes on public holidays. Online orders for records can be placed at any time. Ordered records are retrieved and delivered to the Reading Room twice a day (at 10:30 and 14:30) and must be ordered at least two to three hours in advance. To request a record, you must create a user account. When visiting the Reading Room, some items are not allowed. Prohibited items include pens, food and drink, and bags. Permitted items include pencils, silent mobile phones, and digital cameras.

The limits and procedures of the Public Record Office Victoria are in place and enforceable because archives are held and controlled by an authority. Authorities managing archives might include organisations, institutions, courts, governments, cultural groups, or individuals. These authorities have their own rules of access. I can’t decide to drop by to rifle through your kitchen drawer whenever I fancy (if at all) any more than I can pop into the Reading Room of the Public Record Office Victoria on a Friday night. An archive might also have authority over what items it can seize. Seized archival material may be anything from all the bus tickets in your pocket by a ticket inspector to the cultural production of a community during genocide.

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In 2013, I spent time in the Public Record Office Victoria working for a large research project into Indigenous Stolen Wages practices in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in Victoria (see Gunstone 2016; Gunstone and Heckenberg 2009). Stolen Wages is the term given to the control of the wages earned by and owed to Indigenous people by the Australian government and agencies during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The control (withholding, inequality, and theft) of wages was part of the broader Australian history of protectionism, which also included the forced removal of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children from their families (the Stolen Generations). I was searching in the archives of the Victorian Government Reserves and Mission Stations to gather archival evidence of Stolen Wages practices. These places—Lake Tyers, Ramahyuck, Framlingham, Ebenezer, Condah, and Coranderrk—were established by the Central Board for the Protection of Aborigines in the 1860s to provide Indigenous people in Victoria with a provision of food rations and a place to live. However, they also facilitated the undermining of the culture and independence of Indigenous people and the separation of families through contemporaneous policies of the removal of children and the Half Caste Act.

The archives of the Reserves and Mission Stations that I accessed comprised minutes from meetings, diaries kept by the Managers of the Reserves and Mission Stations, correspondence, and financial ledgers. I will discuss the voices available in this archive in more detail in the next chapter, but for now we should simply understand what type of items we might expect to find in an archive and what we should not expect to see.

From the archived items relating to the Reserves and Mission Stations in the Public Record Office Victoria alone, we can learn much about what an archive is and what it is not. An archive is a place for the primary source documents that pertain to a particular event, individual, period, location, policy, or another subjectively significant occurrence as a result of legal, illegal, social, cultural, administrative, commercial, or political activities. It is not a place for those purposeful post-event narratives such as histories written or films made from primary documents (though we may find these items in the archive of an academic journal or in a film archive). Most importantly for this examination, an archive is a politicised institution. Who decides which documents or objects are relevant to a history (and worth retaining and then preserving) and which are not? This is a question of an archival logic that predates the final gathering of the archive itself.

For example, in the records that I looked at in the archives of the Public Record Office Victoria, I read monthly reports by the Station Managers. These monthly reports were mainly concerned with the labour of Indigenous people and the progress of new initiatives. I could not locate such regular first-hand accounts by Indigenous people living on the Reserves and Mission Stations of how they had spent the month or of their experience of new initiatives. I requested and read visitors’ books dating from when Lake Tyers Aboriginal Station was also a tourist attraction due to its proximity to the nearby Gippsland Lakes. Again, I found no first-hand account of what it was like to be part of this tourist attraction. It is not that these accounts are lost; they were never gathered and retained in the first place. Instead, we have the documents of those who held the formal and state power: the non-Indigenous people working on, managing, or visiting the Reserves and Mission Stations. Power and privilege were at work in the original production and retention of these documents. This informs what we then come to have in an archive.

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What, then, is the primary function of an archive? Is it a place for evidence and fact or a place for remembering? What can we remember of Lake Tyers from the monthly reports or the visitors’ book? What evidence or facts do these records provide? We are left with the remnants that were thought at the time to be worth recording and preserving; the remnants that thought they were a whole. We remember a fragment of an event through the archive, not the whole story. We might remember an event from the pieces of writing or the maps produced, but we know little from these documents about what it was like for all actors in an event or a time. We often do not know what is missing; it is either lost or never recorded. Remembering through the archive is more a process of recollection of parts than a re-membering of the whole.

These records, as we shall unravel as we go, are often privileged as the real record, the evidence. Remember that I was in the Public Record Office Victoria looking for archival data that could form part of the evidence that Stolen Wages practices had taken place in Victoria. These are important records, and it is therefore important to consider what is not there.

If there are not only unrecorded and missing parts, but also missing records that we do not know about and cannot guess, then how can there be a certainty when speaking of the archive? How do we know what limits to place on the places and holdings that we describe as an archive or as archival? Derrida in Archive Fever (1996) writes: “Nothing is less reliable, nothing is less clear today than the word ‘archive’” (90). The archive has gone beyond being a space solely for the keeping of records. It is also an institutional space and a space of power. It is in understanding the purpose of an archive—to remember or to provide evidence—that the line between what is ‘in’ and what is ‘out’ becomes blurred.

The archive is no longer simply the place that holds all available and conclusive information. The archive does not exist in a vacuum, and its holdings tell more than one story. The archive also conceals, either discarding or making certain records unavailable. While the remnants of history kept in an archive are not the complete record of the event, they and the archives in which they are held are co-productive of the concept of history. What occurs in the archive is a re-presentation; a telling of and response to an event that always differs from the lived event. The archive represents the desire for order and a linear representation of the event. The archive is the desire for evidence, for an explicit and accurate description after the fact. These desires drive the archive.

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There is no resolution in the archive between the singularity of the lived experience of the event and its memory and the transformation of history into an archive. Within each encounter with the archive, with its language, its materiality, is always an overlapping or dissolution of singular memories that unfold to form a history, with that history appearing in the archive as a singular whole. Within this whole, the line between re-presentation and representation blurs. Do we find in the archive the history of the event or do we find a history of what was allowed to be remembered instead?

In Foucault’s (1972) writings on the archive, he states that “(t)he archive is first the law of what can be said” (145). The archive as a governed space from which decisions are made about what is to be kept, how it is to be kept, and how it will be accessed. Even before the archive is gathered, we keep our records of events that may one day wind up in an archive. As I have already noted, some things are retained and other things are discarded; some things are written down while other things never make it to paper. There is a power at work over what is ‘in’ and what is ‘out’.

Through the ways by which the Public Record Office Victoria might be accessed, we have a clear example of the archive as a governed space. Archives speak about themselves, telling how they are to be accessed and used. What is deposited and saved in an archive of an event or a time can also exert power and a privileging logic over how we, today, think of an event or a time. The archive therefore requires us to look and think beyond the documents in front of us. We cannot assume that just because only a visitors’ book is retained in the archive of the Public Record Office Victoria from tourism to the Lake Tyers Aboriginal Station that nothing else remains to be said. The archive requires us to look at both the conditions under which a visitors’ book, or any document in the archive, was available, written in, and then retained.

The power that governs an archive requires us to se...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Archiving Loss
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Pouring Memory
• PART I The Archive
• PART II Archive Fever
• PART III Remembering in the Archive
• References
• Index