AustLit

Life writing that incorporates in some way representations of traumatic experiences is prevalent in the Australian literary tradition. The AustLit Trauma Texts: Reading Australian Life Narratives of Trauma, 1990-2015 project is concerned with trauma narratives that can be categorised as life writing: forms of literature that take a life – the author’s or someone else’s – as their subject and that were published between 1990-2015. Such texts may include memoir, testimony, autobiography, and biography (Smith and Watson 4). Memoir, in particular, grew in popularity in the 1990s as a popular form through which narratives of trauma could circulate publically. These true stories of suffering allow survivors to bear witness to traumatic experiences and events, and they enter into a relationship with the reader, compelling readers to receive the testimony, to acknowledge the experiences. Whether it is a personal and individual account – of childhood sexual abuse, for example – or a large-scale cultural trauma which constitutes an historical event – such as war or terrorism –– trauma is an event or experience in the life of the sufferer, signifying a clear break and an irreversible change from what came before it to what comes after it. Trauma survivors often struggle to integrate such shocking experiences into their sense of self and memory, just as societies struggle to integrate collective traumas into a broader cultural narrative or identity (Staines 110). Trauma Texts allows the relationship between the so-called ‘memoir boom’ and the depiction of traumatic experiences to become more apparent.

Personal narratives of trauma emerge as a way of making sense of such an inconceivable break between the past and the future. Suzette Henke has suggested that ‘scriptotherapy’ (writing about one’s experience of trauma) has the potential to help heal trauma survivors by ‘writing out and writing through traumatic experience’ (xii). Here, narrating traumatic experience becomes an essential part of a healing process: ‘it is only when a trauma story becomes a testimonial, when it is being spoken about and witnessed by others, that a healing of the wound can take place. Often, unless a trauma victim reclaims the horror of the event in narrative form, the shattered self cannot recover’ (Stroinska, Cecchetto and Szymanski 14). So, trauma texts offer survivors the possibility of recovering from trauma and integrating their experience into cultural memory and history.

Autobiography scholar Leigh Gilmore in The Limits of Autobiography: Trauma and Testimony, points to the difficulties of articulating trauma: ‘language about trauma is theorized as an impossibility, language is pressed forward as that which can heal the survivor of trauma. Thus language bears a heavy burden in the theorization of trauma. It marks a site where expectations amass: Can language be found for this experience? Will a listener emerge who can hear it?’ (6). This irresolvable tension between language and traumatic experience creates a complication in the production and reception of life writing. Language is at once insufficient for expressing deep human suffering—in the sense that there are no words to describe trauma—and yet necessary in enabling survivors to heal. Authors of trauma texts attempt to negotiate this tension and to express that which is inexplicable and to speak the unspeakable. We can see these tensions through the texts that we index in this project. At particular cultural moments, certain narratives of experience become intelligible, both in terms of writing and also reception/reading. We have aimed to show such cultural shifts in this project in highlighting particular waves of representation and publication in relation to trauma.

Traumatic life narratives are sites at which the personal and the political intersect. Although these stories are personal accounts, they ‘provide a human link (for readers) to access and reflect upon broader social and political events‘ (Douglas n.p.). Personal narratives emerge from and around trauma of varying kinds and scales and they reflect ‘the struggle to integrate an event personally and collectively’ (Staines 110). Deborah Staines understands cultural trauma to be ‘a kind of embedded and permanent damage to a society and its culture,’ ‘a society struggling to integrate an event and continuing to relive it’ (110). In the Australian context, life narratives from Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples re/telling Australia’s violent colonial history (and present) attest to the personal and broader political functions life stories can have regarding collective traumas and histories. The History Wars in Australia and the ongoing denial of Aboriginal sovereignty reveals the significance of life narratives in articulating and correcting the historical record and, therefore, improving the contemporary cultural understanding and wellbeing of a society.

In a different way, when individual stories of traumatic experiences such as sexual assault, physical abuse, or mental illness are made public they bring to light social issues that have previously been conceived of as ‘private matters’. Memoir has offered a platform for trauma survivors—whose testimonies may often be silenced in more official discourses such as the medical institution—to speak and to tell their stories (Gilmore 14-15). Further, trauma studies also extends its reach to take in the stories of relatives and friends of those who have directly experienced traumatic events, those who witness trauma, or those on the periphery of trauma (Kaplan 1-2).

But life writing is also a literary genre. Whether it is through helping to make sense of a single devastating event that has impacted upon many lives or helping to open up discussion about diverse social and personal traumas, personal narratives can be understood as having a broader value to the cultures in which they circulate. This project focusses on creating a resource that enables researchers to access Australian trauma texts from 1990-2015. This period captures the memoir boom in which interest in life narratives—and particularly traumatic life narratives—surged. The Trauma Texts project began in 2013 to collate and examine the range of trauma represented in contemporary life narratives. Through the identification, creation, and compilation of bibliographic records, Trauma Texts has catalogued the types of trauma represented, as well as the geographic and temporal settings of the trauma narratives and collecting the publication data in this way provides an insight into the relationship between trauma and life narrative in Australia in the period of 1990-2015.

For the purposes of this project, trauma is understood as significant physical and/or psychological harm experienced by a person or persons, on an individual or collective level. Gillian Whitlock and Kate Douglas (3) observe prominent trends in scholarly inquiry into trauma and life narrative such as ‘the ethics of testimony and witnessing, the commodification of traumatic story, and politics of recognition’ (3). In their edited collection Trauma Texts, they seek to broaden the scope of trauma scholarship ‘to carry thinking about life narrative and trauma across generations, into various texts, media and artefacts, representing diverse histories within nation and beyond, and with specific attention to voices, bodies, memories, sites and subjectivities’ (3-4). Contemporary narratives of trauma traverse a range of experiences, events, geographies and histories. Traumatic events and situations experienced both in Australia and abroad are common in the dataset. For example, significant post-war immigration and community history projects have produced autobiographies by Jewish survivors of the Holocaust. Trauma experienced by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples throughout the earlier colonial period and twentieth century are abundant in the dataset, particularly illuminated by oral history projects and by the 1990s Royal Commission into the practices and experiences of Aboriginal child removal culminating in the 1997 Bringing Them Home: The ‘Stolen Children’ Report. Life narratives of asylum seekers arriving in Australia since mandatory detention was introduced in 1992 are also notable features of this collection, with trauma increasingly being experienced in both the initial countries of flight and in the Australian-run detention and processing facilities. Autobiographies of childhood, a publishing trend within the memoir ‘boom’ of the 1990s and early 2000s, frequently contain depictions of childhood trauma, particularly child abuse, and this is evident in Trauma Texts. Within this subset of works, there are many life narratives featuring child abuse and child sexual abuse, with the trauma often occurring in familial and institutional ‘home’ spaces. Rod Braybon’s life story, written by Vikki Petraitis, Salvation: The True Story of Rod Braybon's Fight for Justice tells the story of Braybon’s growing up in the notorious Bayswater Boys’ Home in 1950s. The biography was referenced in a submission to Victoria’s Inquiry into the Handling of Child Abuse by Religious and Other Organisations. Braybon’s traumatic childhood experiences while in institutional care are now being witnessed and acknowledged by not only his biography’s direct readers, but by State government institutions as well. As the Terms of Reference for the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Childhood Sexual Abuse were established on January 11, 2013, stories such as Braybon’s will continue to influence national conversations about individual and collective trauma.

Trauma Texts explores how various kinds of personal and collective traumas are represented in the Australian literary and print tradition. These works, and Australian life writings more broadly, can be illuminated and understood differently through the rich bibliographic capacities of AustLit research projects. Collecting these works together provides an insight into the themes, content, authorship, and publication data, allowing new understandings to develop around trauma in Australian life writing published between 1990 and 2015.

Works Cited

Douglas, Kate. ‘Life Writing.’ The Encyclopedia of the Novel. Ed. Peter Melville Logan. Oxford: Blackwell, 2011. Web.

Gilmore, Leigh. The Limits of Autobiography: Trauma and Testimony. Ithaca, New York: Cornell UP, 2001. Print.

Henke, Suzette. Shattered Subjects: Trauma and Testimony in Women’s Life-Writing. New York: St Martin’s P, 1998. Print.

Kaplan, E. Ann. Trauma Culture: The Politics of Terror and Loss in Media and Literature. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 2005. Print.

Petraitis, Vikki. Salvation: The True Story of Rod Braybon’s Fight for Justice. Brighton East, VIC: Jewel Publishing, 2009. Print.

Smith, Sidonie and Julia Watson. Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives. Second Ed. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2010. Print.

Staines, Deborah. ‘Textual Traumata: Letters to Cindy Chamberlain.’ Whitlock, Gillian and Kate Douglas, eds. Trauma Texts. New York: Routledge, 2009. Print.

Stroińska, Magda, Vikki Cecchetto and Kate Szymanski, eds. The Unspeakable: Narratives of Trauma. New York: PL Academic Research, 2014. Print.

Whitlock, Gillian and Kate Douglas, eds. Trauma Texts. London: Taylor and Francis, 2015. Print.