AustLit

'This article explores stories of rewriting Australian history by Aboriginal women through literature. My focus is on the narrative poetry and prose testimonials by Aboriginal women writers that interact with the archive, using the term archive as Derrida defined it: as something that is much broader than but including storehouses of official paper work and records and that evokes voices from the past that recall and re-member trauma and resilience through "blood memory" (see Allen) and the Aboriginal body-particularly the bodies of Aboriginal women. Our bodies are an archive where memories are etched, stored, and anchored. This is the living archive that I inherit, and my mind and body becomes a repository of my family's Aboriginal history-even before it was told to me and even now as some of it still remains untold or is still missing. Thus, for me, the politics of memory is to remember a dismembered but still living past as it haunts, pervades, and lives in the present.' (Publication abstract)