Michael Piggott*
‘Broken Years, Black convicts and Bennelong: some inadvertent irritations’, Honest History, 19 November 2024
The online world seems awash at the moment with lists of things annoying baby-boomers, and indeed why they themselves are so annoying. Archivists have their lists too, including the occasional stupidity of other archivists. What on earth, for example, was the thinking behind the headline ‘Denis the Archivist, hidden away like his historical gems’?
For this author, three words sum up recent irritation.
‘Hidden’
In his generous review of Peter Stanley’s Beyond the Broken Years (NewSouth, 2024) in the November 2024 issue of Australian Book Review, Robin Gerster noted the title behind the title. This was Bill Gammage’s The Broken Years (1974), which, Robin wrote, Bill had written based on ‘a treasure trove of diaries and letters hitherto hidden away in the Australian War Memorial (AWM) in Canberra’.
Gerster’s comment was innocent, I’m sure, alluding only in general terms to one of the stories which has attended the fifty-year publishing afterlife of what became a classic. But still, ‘hidden away’? At best, an unfortunate choice of words.
As usual, my knee-jerk thoughts begged a question. Hidden by whom? The Memorial library staff? The cleaners? Competing historians? A thieving black-market trader in documents who was planning to return under cover? And thoughts of gratitude: thank God, Bill had been clever enough to winkle out those hidden diaries and letters.
Down the years, my reaction to such accusation-wrapped observations has never varied – a reaction tinged with resignation but hope, too, that attitudes will change. Up there with the ‘dusty’-archives-kept-in-damp-basements trope and the always negative image of red tape. Up there with the heroic Lost Ark-raiding historian who makes ‘discoveries’ while overcoming bureaucratic gatekeepers or an evil Palace lackey archivist called Denis, or even David.
In truth, the Memorial staff couldn’t believe their luck when Bill, having been shown a sample diary or two during a visit with his mother in 1960 while still in high school, started asking to see the diaries and letters for his Honours, then Masters, then doctoral research. Hidden away in the Acknowledgments of The Broken Years no less are fulsome expressions of gratitude for ‘a thousand kindnesses’ shown by the Memorial’s library staff, two, Bruce Harding and Vera Blackburn, especially mentioned. There was ‘acceptance’, free access, and an ‘invaluable’ Board of Trustees grant to help with research overseas.
To mark the 20th anniversary of his book, Bill recalled background detail to this welcome, in an article hidden away in the April 1994 issue of the Journal of the Australian War Memorial. It was an unprecedented welcome which included an unsupervised ‘run of the shelves’, and cups of tea and diaries and letters brought to the desk set up for him near where sat the legendary Arthur Bazley, Acting Director of the Memorial, 1942-46, and later instrumental in the development of its collection.
So, in fact, the sources had been there for decades, hidden in plain sight, waiting for changing historical interests to see their value. Even Charles Bean all but ignored them. ‘I believe’, wrote Gammage, ‘I was the first non-official researcher to use the Memorial for a sustained research project’.
A final point, given what that word ‘hidden’ implies. It hardly needs saying that there are indeed numerous barriers to accessing archives – among them restrictions on access, poorly designed cataloguing systems, lack of digitisation, lack of preservation and, affecting all of those, funding shortfalls.
It hardly needs saying either that what constitutes a barrier also changes – once upon a time, remoteness of originals and poor handwriting were tolerated. Today, the lack of cultural sensitivity is finally being acknowledged and remedial efforts made, including decolonising collections and trauma-informed training.
‘Silenced’
The late Hilary Mantel, in the first of her 2017 Reith Lectures about writing historical fiction, explained that her creative imagination drew on intense historical research, and how gaps, erasures and silences defined the territory she felt free to fictionalise. About gaps, she added a crucial rider: ‘where there should have been evidence’.
In The Saturday Paper’s first issue for November, Santilla Chingaipe wrote of ghosts in the archive and the haunting personal impact of her research for her new book, Black Convicts: How Slavery Shaped Australia (Simon & Schuster, 2024).
Santilla’s article covered her emotional responses to documenting 500 or so convicts of African descent transported to Australia between 1788 and 1840. But she made observations in passing about those ‘who have been erased, silenced and overlooked’ and about ‘archival exclusions and omissions’.
Specifically, regarding her book’s sources, Santilla noted:
The colonial archives provided scant firsthand testimony written by Black convicts. Almost all the material I retrieved was written about them by those in positions of power and authority.
My first unkind thought reading this was to wonder: seriously, what did she expect from convict records? Some forerunner of the KGB’s literary archive? The recordkeeping by carceral systems, empires, gulags and for-profit corporations among many, many others is intended to facilitate the administrative ends of the system in support of its larger financial and geopolitical goals. Their records are what Ann Stoler, the great anthropologist and historian, called ‘technologies of rule’ and are rich in detail, as Janet McCalman, among many others, has shown.
Santilla is alert to the relevance of her sources’ production (‘who is doing the recording and why’), and from the scholars she quotes just in this short piece she is clearly aware of archival complexities and limitations. Her publisher was not so constrained. Its blurb tossed off lines such as ‘lives whitewashed out of our history’ and ‘The story of Australia’s Black convicts has been all but erased from our history’, meaning, now they’ve been put back, as you’ll see when you buy the book.
No. For a variety of social and cultural reasons, it took until the early 2020s for this Zambian-Australian author and film-maker to champion this new topic, just as, for a variety of reasons, it took until the late 1960s for a young man from rural Wagga Wagga to write a new kind of primary source-based history, and that not military but emotional.
Which is not to say there is no link between silence and archives. That is a vast and complex subject ranging from census destruction, shredding by retreating armies, presidents and the Stasi, to non-functioning police body cams and self-censoring diarists.
Then there are the ‘unarchived’, those, as New Zealand scholar Kathryn Hunter put it, ‘who have chosen to be absent’, those on the margins of society who for various reasons ‘engaged in strategies of non-mention’. By contrast, archivists are bit players, though they could argue at least that those among them facilitating community archives and social history collections aim to document voices otherwise ’silenced’.
As well, in the past decade some archivists, especially those in the UK publishing with Facet and Routledge, have produced case study analyses of archival silencing. Historians and other scholars, especially those interested in post-colonial and feminist issues, have been working similarly for many decades.
‘Unreferenced’
Sometimes historians see a lack of resources, change their hats and, like the economic historian Noel Butlin, build their own collections of archives. Similarly, with the social anthropologists Ronald and Catherine Berndt and anthropologist and linguist Ted Strehlow. These are exceptions: historians know, broadly speaking, they have no choice other than to work with the materials to hand – primary sources accessible via cultural heritage and higher education institutions or digital repositories, or held in private hands and private minds.
But if the study of the past is the study of present traces of the past, this does not mean that the definition of what constitutes an evidential trace cannot be expanded. It now includes language, embodied knowledge and performance, that is, the full array of intangible cultural expressions, as Jeannette Bastian has explained.
Nor does it mean that the initial reason for the creation of records dictates how they are later used. Once their texture and granularity are understood ethnographically, they can be productively read, as Stoler put it, along and against the grain. New uses, of course, go well beyond historians writing histories, as the creation and exploitation of the Cambodian Tuol Sleng Archive and Guatemalan civil war police records attest.
Which brings us to Kate Fullagar’s Bennelong & Phillip: a History Unravelled (Scribner, 2023). How can we know about the famous Indigenous Australian Bennelong (c.1764-1813), including his years in England 1793-95? Rather than allege Bennelong has been erased or silenced, Fullagar reconstructed his parallel life from archaeology, art works, the related research of colleagues such as Keith Smith and Grace Karskens, but fundamentally from the contemporary official imperial record plus personal journals (James Cook, Joseph Banks, William Bradley, John Hunter, Daniel Southwell) and contemporary published accounts (David Collins, Watkin Tench).
True, such sources include details only about Bennelong; his authentic voice survives in a single letter dictated by him. Fullagar shows great sensitivity towards her sources’ limits: often sentences begin ‘Possibly’ or ‘Probably’ or include qualifications like ‘At the least, it appears …’ and ‘We don’t know …’, admissions as in ‘How much Bennelong understood … is hard to gauge’ and assumptions such as ‘Bennelong would not have been able to … ’.
The Indigenous response to Bennelong & Phillip was positive, historian Lynette Russell, for example, calling it ‘reconciled history at its very best’. Yet recovering First Nations experience from first contact need not be limited just to the Western archive. In Warra Warra Wai: How Indigenous Australians Discovered Captain Cook, and What They Tell about the Coming of the Ghost People (Scribner, 2024), Darren Rix and Craig Cormick present the shoreline view of Cook’s explorations. They drew on ‘tales passed down’ having, as their publisher elaborated
travelled to all the places on the east coast that were renamed by Cook, and listened to people’s stories. With their permission, these stories have been woven together with the European accounts and placed in their deeper context: the places Cook named already had names; the places he ‘discovered’ already had peoples and stories stretching back before time …
A last point about Bennelong & Phillip, to arrive at my third gripe. Fullagar includes endnotes with proper referencing (and an index), to her and her publisher’s credit.
In an equally fine if different book, Cassandra Pybus’ A Very Secret Trade: the Dark Story of Gentlemen Collectors in Tasmania (Allen & Unwin, 2024), citation notes (and an index) are absent. The book is a work of deep archival research in Australia, the UK, Ireland and Europe, it lists relevant sources located in institutions there, its narrative includes direct quotes from the sources, and occasionally it integrates the name of the collection and institution into the flow of the writing. Indeed, the sources, their discovery, provenance, gaps and reliability and the author’s emotional responses are the subject of commentary throughout.
It seems, however, that Allen & Unwin couldn’t care less if the reader just might wish to follow up on points made (triggered by interest, related research or simple disbelief). Cassandra’s book on the collecting of Indigenous skeletal remains is a book which implicates racist individuals and craven institutions, which provides a compelling case for calling what happened in Tasmania genocide, whose publisher’s blurbs refer to ‘truth-telling’, and which rests for its authority largely on archival evidence.
And the trustworthiness of archival evidence rests partly on being properly referenced. Cassandra Pybus and we deserved better.
*Michael Piggott AM is a retired archivist who has written many reviews and other pieces for Honest History and now for Defending Country; use the Honest History Search engine or References by author.
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