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AbstractHistoryArchive Description
'This paper explores stories of re-mapping the archives through art and poetic-prose, using ideas of haunting through ‘memory in the blood.’ Our family archives are like maps that haunt and guide us toward paths past-travelled and directions unknown. We travel through these archives that offer up new stories and collections of data, and a brutal surveillance is exposed at the hands of the State. We gain insight into intimate conversations, letters, behaviours and movements, juxtaposed with categorisations of people, places, landscapes and objects. These records are our memories and lives; material, visceral, flesh and blood. The State wounds and our records bleed. I travel through my own Nanna’s records and recognise that we have never lived outside the State, and this very act of recognition continues the wounding. State acts of surveillance, recording and archiving had the power to place our
family stories in the public domain, or obliterate stories within a broader history of erasure; filed away, silent and hidden until bidden. But our bodies too are archives where memories, stories, and lived experiences are stored, etched and anchored in our bloodlines deep. They ground our creativity in what become personal and political acts of remembering, identity making and speaking back to the State. Detective-like methods allow us to creatively re-map events and landscapes, piece together lives fragmented and heal our wounds.' ((Re) Mapping the Archive, 4)
Notes
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Epigraph:
It is the fever in the archive after all, the same fever that drives the hoarding (the holding) which might drive an attempt to touch something of the event. To feel this drive to touch is to be haunted by a possibility of something beyond (before, within) the archive. It is here that we contemplate whether or not that which we were approaching is actually approaching us. (Hawkes 206)
Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of
Works about this Work
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Writing with the Australian Archive : Digital Posthuman Approaches to Australian Literature
2023
single work
criticism
— Appears in: JASAL , 10 August vol. 23 no. 1 2023;Author's note: 'Research Background
This practice-led research was written as part of a broader project into digital literary creative practice. This project explores the process of creating digital-born literature, i.e. works that depend on a computer to exist. It uses Italo Calvino’s Six memos for the Next Millennium as a means to produce digital literary works that renegotiate text and images through recombinant poetics.'Research Contribution
Building upon Natalie Harkin’s concept of archival-poetics, this work employs digital literary techniques to interrogate and navigate the Australian archive. The ‘icastic’ image of the camel is used to lighten and quickly navigate the posthuman weight of the archive. Following text-image practitioners such as W.G. Sebald and Ross Gibson, the initial ‘static’ work is reimagined using curatorial software, augmented reality, and recombinant poetics. This makes a contribution to both Australian archival studies and Australia digital literary practice.'Research Significance
The significance of this work is its use of the icastic image as a prismatic symbol to navigate the posthuman weight of the archive. If the archive is both problematic and posthuman, then such creative research techniques are requisite. Traditional scholarly approaches are limited, so the implementation of creative practice that employs Calvino’s values and digital technologies are necessary to interrogate the archive and address the ‘grave consequences’ (Derrida’s proviso) that result from challenging the processes by which the archive has been established.' (Publication abstract)
-
Writing with the Australian Archive : Digital Posthuman Approaches to Australian Literature
2023
single work
criticism
— Appears in: JASAL , 10 August vol. 23 no. 1 2023;Author's note: 'Research Background
This practice-led research was written as part of a broader project into digital literary creative practice. This project explores the process of creating digital-born literature, i.e. works that depend on a computer to exist. It uses Italo Calvino’s Six memos for the Next Millennium as a means to produce digital literary works that renegotiate text and images through recombinant poetics.'Research Contribution
Building upon Natalie Harkin’s concept of archival-poetics, this work employs digital literary techniques to interrogate and navigate the Australian archive. The ‘icastic’ image of the camel is used to lighten and quickly navigate the posthuman weight of the archive. Following text-image practitioners such as W.G. Sebald and Ross Gibson, the initial ‘static’ work is reimagined using curatorial software, augmented reality, and recombinant poetics. This makes a contribution to both Australian archival studies and Australia digital literary practice.'Research Significance
The significance of this work is its use of the icastic image as a prismatic symbol to navigate the posthuman weight of the archive. If the archive is both problematic and posthuman, then such creative research techniques are requisite. Traditional scholarly approaches are limited, so the implementation of creative practice that employs Calvino’s values and digital technologies are necessary to interrogate the archive and address the ‘grave consequences’ (Derrida’s proviso) that result from challenging the processes by which the archive has been established.' (Publication abstract)
JASAL
- Finding Ullagundahi Island 2001 single work novel
- The Aboriginal Sovereign Woman 2007 single work criticism
- The End in the Beginning : Re(de)finding Aboriginality : 1994 Wentworth Lecture 2003 single work essay
- Blood Language 2009 selected work prose
- Politics of Writing 2002 single work autobiography
