Thesis
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archives_of_sorrow.pdf
Archives of Sorrow: An Exploration of Australia’s Stolen Generations and their Journey into the Past Fiona Murphy
We primarily see the archive as a storehouse of memory and fact, as the place from whence
history issues forth. However, the archive is much more than this; it is a site of memory
and a place of trauma and pain. It is a place of sorrow and loss for many, where unpacified
ghosts with unfinished business await, yielding stories and letters different from expec-
tation, a site where loss is localized and realized. It is also a space of confrontation,
where expectations are denounced as lies, and where the truth assumes a different
colour. This article examines the role of the archive in the lives of Australia’s Stolen
Generations (Aboriginal Australians who were removed from their families and institu-
tionalized from 1910 until the mid-1970s), and argues that returning to the archive is
both an attempt to confront and negotiate past traumas and one’s relationship to
unknown worlds. Through the use of an ethnographic case study, I will detail the impor-
tant links between returning to the archive and ideas of healing, and moving forward.
Keywords: Australia; Stolen Generations; Archive; Trauma; Healing
Introduction
We sit together in their tidy living room. The sweet smell of coffee hangs above us as do
photographs of smiling children. I listen as Patrick recounts his life as a member of
Australia’s Stolen Generations. From a nearby cabinet, he pulls out a string of
documents, letters, newspaper reports, and the Bringing Them Home (BTH) report.
His wife points to the colourful paintings hanging on the wall; telling me in soft
Correspondence to: Fiona Murphy, Department of Anthropology, National University of Ireland, Co. Kildare,
Ireland. Email: [email protected]
History and Anthropology, Vol. 22, No. 4, December 2011, pp. 481 – 495
ISSN 0275-7206 print/1477-2612 online/11/040481 – 15 # 2011 Taylor & Francis
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02757206.2011.626775
tones that Patrick had taken up painting since his retirement from a successful career
in the transport industry. The vibrant colours and Aboriginal patterns spiral off the
canvas giving a sense of warmth and energy to their small comfortable home.
Patrick and his wife tell me about their happy life together and their beautiful children.
Then, more slowly, he begins to speak about his past, his removal from his family and
his time in Kinchela Aboriginal boys’ home. One by one, we examine letters from his
mother and father begging the Aboriginal Welfare Board to send their children home.
Etched between these beseeching words are the stains of grief and suffering that his
natural mother felt when her large family was removed from her. We sit together in
silence for a long time pouring over Patrick’s personal history of removal, preserved
in the form of letters and reports, many collected by Patrick and his daughter from
the NSW archives (Fieldnotes 2004).
On 26 May 1997, the Australian Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commis-
sion, tabled one of the most shocking and painful reports that Australia had ever
seen. The BTH report was the result of months of consultations across Australia
and established that from 1910 until the late 1970s between one in three and one in
ten Indigenous children were forcibly removed from their families. The Commission
listened to nearly 600 stories of removal, abuse, loss, and continuing pain and trauma
and had access to nearly a thousand more in written form. What followed were months
of intense debate on the nature of the removals, the policies, and whether what had
happened was genocidal in intent (see Moses 2004). “Stolen Generations” were
called upon across the continent to tell their stories, to allow Australians from all back-
grounds to bear witness to the crimes and tortures of a past both known and unknown
(see Haebich 2000). 1
Amidst the flurry of telling came newspaper articles, autobiogra-
phies, documentaries, films, and a keener sense among many members of the Stolen
Generations that they had to address both their individual and collective trauma.
Testimony, memorialization, reparations, and reunions on the sites of former insti-
tutions were all seen as legitimate routes for healing and eventual reconciliation.
This article engages with recent attempts by members of Australia’s Stolen Gener-
ations to come to terms with past trauma by returning to the archives in order to
trace both their personal history of removal and family history. It is an ethnographic
reflection on the complexities inherent in any consideration of the “archive” as both a
space of knowledge and interaction, and as an object of study, one where loss is both
localized and realized. Discussions of documents, files, stories of removal, and “evi-
dence” all figured large in my fieldwork interactions over the course of the two
years that I worked with members of the Stolen Generations for my Doctoral research
thesis on the politicization of trauma, memory, and reconciliation in Australia. A large
number of my ethnographic encounters and interviews involved my research partici-
pants showing me large files composed of letters from their parents, reports from the
institutions in which they were held, segments of reports from those involved in the
removal of Aboriginal children. In a number of ways, encountering these “trauma
portfolios” (James 2004: 131) propelled me to reflect on how trauma and suffering
become materialized and indeed, archived. Such encounters also signalled the need
to reflect on how conducting an ethnography of the archive has the potentiality to
482 F. Murphy
overturn conventional thinking on not only the archival project but on the ways in
which traumatic memory can be inscribed, understood, and reconceived through its
very materiality in the archival space. Through an analysis of how the past is imagined
and re-constructed by members of the Stolen Generations, I intend here to comment
on the archive as a complex and contradictory space of psychic and material trans-
formation to which historian, trauma survivor, and ethnographer (to name but a
few) have differing yet converging sets of relationships. In this piece, only one
aspect of the story of the Stolen Generations, I will show how the “broken stories”
(Jackson 2002) of Australia’s colonial past came to be “uncovered”, through the
work of cultural historian Peter Read and others, and further, through the personal
research of members of the Stolen Generations.
As an ethnographer, I have both a personal and professional relationship to the story
of the archive. In my fieldwork with members of the Stolen Generations, I began to
understand that each time a file was re-opened, a letter re-read, and the story of
removal retold my respondents were forced into the contradictory role of custodian
of the traumatic nature of Aboriginal child removal. Even further, members of the
Stolen Generations re-conceptualize their bodies as archives in situations where
documentary evidence and “proof ” of their removal and abuse are absent; one of
my respondents frequently showed the imprint of the letter H on her leg, burned
into her flesh by those who ran the institution in which she lived to remind a little
Aboriginal girl that “hell was the only place she would be going”. Whether the unco-
vering of such narratives then can be deemed “remedy or poison” as Ricoeur (2004:
135) asks in relation to the archive, is a question which this article as a, “self conscious
ethnography” (Burton 2005: 6) of the archive will attempt to answer (see also Dirks
2002). Within such complex idioms of confrontation, negotiation, and hurt in relation
to the archival space, I, as ethnographer, was also forced to understand the impetus
of revisiting one’s past in its material form and the subsequent crafting of new possi-
bilities and futures. On a personal level, I found myself in these encounters with
“documents with itineraries of their own” (Stoler 2009: 3), both moved and challenged
on an emotional level, and furthermore, encouraged to unravel my own family’s
relationship to the history of Catholic-run “industrial schools” in Ireland (see Rafferty
& O’Sullivan 1999). The ghosts of Australia’s colonial past in many ways forced me to
confront the ghosts of my own family’s past, and to begin to understand the life my
grandfather had led in one of Ireland’s notorious industrial schools.2 This article
then unfolds into a conversation with what should emerge as an “affective archive”
(Cvetkovich 2003), one which I see as a storehouse of ghosts (see Nesmith 1999), as
a space which both enables trauma survivors (specifically members of the Stolen
Generations in this case) to connect with their origins, to piece together their past
worlds, and finally (in some instances), to enter into a nascent conversation with
the politics of healing and reconciliation, as such revealing the complex social and
political life of archival documents.
It is here that the archive becomes an important site of interaction, particularly
between historian, trauma survivor, and the competing narratives and myths of colo-
nial time past, as well as the politicization of the postcolonial collective conscience. For
History and Anthropology 483
Ann Stoler (2009: 1), colonial archives are, “sites of the expectant and conjured-about
dreams of confronting futures and forebodings of future failings”, and it is both with
this story of the Stolen Generations and the archive that I hope to articulate this
relationship to the interlocking but yet contradictory invocations and allusions engen-
dered by the archive. The “public secret” (Taussig 1999) of the removal of Australian
Aboriginal children did not receive public attention until the 1980s, only gaining criti-
cal interest in the late 1990s. With this public attention, many Stolen Generations
finally found the courage to journey into their past. While it is beyond the scope of
this article to point to the emergence of the story and stories of the Stolen Generations
on the national (and global) stage (particularly as a political and national narrative of
redemption), I would like to, nonetheless, highlight the relationship of one historian in
particular to the history of the Stolen Generations. Peter Read, a historian conducting
research in the archives for his doctoral thesis, was one of the first historians to write
about the Stolen Generations, and in so doing became one of the first to begin a
serious conversation with the ghosts of colonial time past and present. Read’s
journey with the Stolen Generations began in the 1970s when he began to conduct
oral history interviews with Aboriginal peoples. In 1980, he began work on a PhD
thesis on the Wiradjuri people. Once he had obtained permission to research the
records of the Aborigines Protection Board in the NSW State records office, he
began to understand the true extent of the removal policies. Read writes:
The Board began to keep longer running files on each ward from about 1933. I began making my way through them, scarcely able to grasp the casual cruelty inflicted upon the children in its direct charge and care, nor the unwillingness of the officials to analyse the comprehensive failure of the separation policy evidenced in their own records. (1996: 47)
For Read, the archive held the painful story and stories of the Stolen Generations. His
uncovering of them and subsequent participation in founding Link-Up, an organiz-
ation which provides counselling and reunion services for those affected by removal
policies was, I argue, an important moment in Australian historiography. The
archive, seen as a site of recovery by some, became for Read and the stories that
issued forth, a site which allowed the painful release of phantoms from the past.
Read writes:
When at length I reached the end of those 700 files, I at last understood that the red herrings of missionary zeal, malnutrition, parental neglect, the best interest of the child and the standards of the day, concealed a violent and premeditated attack not only on Aboriginal family structure but also on the very basis of Aboriginality itself. (1996: 47)
The story of historian Peter Read, beginning a journey with the Stolen Generations in
the archive parallels the story of many Stolen Generations beginning their journey of
self-discovery in the archive. It is the story that articulates the beginnings of a dialogue
with the revenants of the past for individual members of the Stolen Generations, and
indeed, for the Australian collective. Stories and storytelling, as Michael Jackson (2002:
130) reminds us, “mediates our relationship with worlds that extend beyond us”, and it
is in and through this relationship between archive, historian, Stolen Generation, and
484 F. Murphy
the broader collective that individual stories and the collective story of the history of
Aboriginal child removal have gained the potency with which to breach seemingly
accepted “histories” and forms of remembrance. Hiding out in the archives, in numer-
ous Australian States, are the material consequences of a colonial past enshrined in
policy and documents. What this highlights is the way in which the intended uses
and meanings of documents change and are renegotiated. Documents, filled with pol-
itical rhetoric and once used to legitimize the removal of Aboriginal children, can now
be read as documents which speak of ethnocide, racism, and disdain for Australia’s
Indigenous population. Documents intended to hide family links, relationships, and
reasons for removal now provide answers to many members of the Stolen Generations
in their search for kith and kin. Many of my informants spent long hours researching
the fragments of their family history and the story of their removal. Often documents
had been misplaced or even destroyed, so it was not always possible to complete this
journey of inquiry. For those fortunate enough to rediscover their origins, the journey
to reconnect with family and culture was often tortuous. Many of my respondents
managed to successfully integrate with their families, even keeping in contact in
spite of geographical distance and/or linguistic difference. A substantial number,
however, did not feel they had in any way managed to re-create or maintain familial
bonds. Returning to their communities, Stolen Generations, then, as I see it,
became akin to the revenant, ghostly reminders of the dark past of removal—familiar
strangers in a fractured community.
I opened this piece with an ethnographic snapshot of one of my informants, Patrick
and his wife. Patrick and his family became (over the course of my fieldwork), not only
some of my closest respondents, but a family who illuminated the shadowy worlds of
the Stolen Generations. They showed me how families divided as young children
would forever remain torn apart. While Patrick and his siblings spent a lot of time con-
versing with one another on the phone, working together on committees for reconci-
liation and Sorry Day, they often told me that their closeness was superficial—they felt
more connected to the children they had spent time with in the institution. Their
brothers and sisters were the children with whom they had grown up with in Kinchela
and Cootamundra Aboriginal children’s institutions. Through the ambivalence of
forced familial bonds and intimacies, many members of the Stolen Generations
managed to sustain links, however fragile, with their natural brothers and sisters. I
was witness to many disappointments and anger as well as moments of revisited
loss when some of my respondents felt their families had forgotten to include them.
From shadowy moments of disinherited bonds, misplaced invitations to family barbe-
ques, forgotten phone calls, and the refusal to ask for help, many members of the
Stolen Generations felt that although they had made the physical journey home to
their family, they had yet to make the emotional one.
Patrick’s journey into the archives was an attempt to confront the past, to discover
the worlds made invisible to him because of the force of removal, and to reconnect
with the home from which he had been removed. Through the archive as a locus of
memory and trauma, Patrick was beginning a conversation with the ghosts of his
past. Returning to the site of trauma, be that a former institution or an archive,
History and Anthropology 485
where the past is folded away in documents and files, is part of the process of moving
forward, of reconnecting with one’s home, place, and Aboriginal country. Many
members of the Stolen Generations take an important step in this journey, in going
to the archive to retrace their families in a place where the shards of loss are gathered
together. In the Australian context (as well as many others), the archive is the site
which contains a sublated history unknown to many, one that is known, however,
in a visceral and lived way by Aboriginal peoples. In keeping the ghosts of time past
and present alive, the archive and its contents signal that which is missing, that
which has hitherto gone unrecognized (Gordon 1997: 63), and that which is to
come, hope in future possibility. The archive, then, and the documents contained
therein signal the social exclusions and power configurations of time past and
present (Stoler 2009). My research participants’ encounter with the archive as a site
of trauma highlights how documentary processes (past and present), in their partiality,
actively select and construct a particular “imaginary” (see Hamilton 2002) which
works to negate, even deny, alternative realities (in this case that of the history of
Australia’s Stolen Generations). Just as importantly, the encounter between the
archival corpus, as a fragmented, partial social context, and members of the Stolen
Generations illuminates what Antoinette Burton (2005: 10) has argued is the,
“tremendous and largely unspoken influence” that the archive exerts on its users,
thus potentially transforming subject formations and their subsequent crafting of
particular narratives (here the story of Aboriginal child removal).
One of the first discussions that I had with Patrick illuminated strikingly the impact
that his search in the archive had had upon his understanding of his past, the broader
story of Aboriginal child removal, and his present-day family life. While the search for
his family began in the late 1970s with a return visit to his mother’s community and a
fleeting meeting with an uncle reluctant to tell him the full version of his life history,
his own career and young family put any suspicions he may have held about the iden-
tity of his father on hold. Being a good husband and father to his young family became
pre-eminent objectives in his life, and he never really spoke to his family about his
experiences in the institutions as a child. It was only much later in life, spurred on
by his children’s growing interest in their family history that he began to reflect in
earnest on the past. Patrick’s journey through the archives of trauma was particularly
painful. While he had made a few trips back to his mother’s homeland in Northern
NSW, he only had suspicions about his family. Accompanied by his daughter, they
were to discover after months of research that he had a different father from his
younger brothers and sisters. His surname was not his surname; he belonged to a
different lineage, he had in some ways a very different story from his siblings. Patrick’s
mother was already pregnant with him as a young girl, his father was a young Abori-
ginal man, and for reasons unknown to Patrick, it appears they never married. When
Patrick’s mother married a white Australian of Dutch descent, Patrick was accepted as
his son and given his name. After some years of living happily together, Patrick and his
siblings were removed from their parents, and placed in different institutions around
the state of New South Wales. Both Patrick and his siblings told me the story of this
first removal many times over the course of my fieldwork. This story of being taken
486 F. Murphy
as a young innocent child was the beginning of a life of institutionalization, a life that
would be eternally wedded to loss and sorrow.
The archive is therefore, I argue, the site where traumatic loss is contained, where
Ricouer (2004: 169) tells us documents and files are divorced from their authors to
become orphans. Ricoeur’s characterization, then, of archival documents as silent
orphans subjected to the stewardship of a range of “professionals” and his warning
that archival documents do not provide evidentiary proofs or “facts” connects to
the experience of my respondents, who, orphaned by the force of removal, attempted
to piece together elements of their shattered lives in the archival space, only to be con-
fronted with the unexpected. The force of the archive then is also in its power to
engage with alternative versions of one’s life. Traumatic experience, Slavoj Žižek
argues, requires, “the traumatised to confront that which did not take place as well
as that which did. The missed opportunities that could have led to alternative histories
are also constitutive parts of what did take place” (Žižek 1991: 189). The archive as a
site of trauma pushes those traumatized to confront alternative histories and alterna-
tive truths. In moving through the archives, Patrick and his daughter uncovered a life
he could have led had he not been removed from his family, only to realize that much
of what he had been told about his removal by officials was in fact untrue. The archive
and its contents made manifest for Patrick and his daughter the haunting, threatening
presence of a State, one which did not have his best interests at heart. The story of
returning to the archive was told to me frequently by both Patrick and his daughter.
It was a place for both of them which contained the lingering effects of the historical
loss that they would have to live with all of their lives. Indeed, for many members of
the Stolen Generations, a number of whom were told while they were growing up that
their parents did not want to care for them or that their parents had died, or that they
had no siblings or family who would want to know them, the archive opens onto a
space of conflicting emotions; it emits resentment, bitterness, anger and paradoxically,
promise and hope. Understanding then the archive in Jeff Sahadeo’s (2005) terms as a
“contact zone” where the dialectical relationship between document and reader engen-
ders a range of dynamic often conflicting experiences, we can begin to understand not
only the contingency of archival practices and readings, but its status as porous to
socio-political discourses and the role it plays in the circulation of affect, in the life
of both the individual interlocutor and the broader collective of the nation-state
(Hamilton 2002).
Malice in the Archive
The act, then, of returning to the archive, of gathering together letters written by dis-
traught parents, of reading through their beseeching, grieving words, has been cited by
my respondents as a particularly important moment in their journey of healing and
conciliation. It is this very journey, most effectively articulated through Patrick’s
story, which epitomizes the putative affective and transformative impact of any
encounter with the archive. Patrick and his family never fully understood why they
had been removed from their mother and father, and while they were returned on a
History and Anthropology 487
few occasions, they were always taken away again. Tracing through the many letters
written by their father and mother begging for the return of their children ignited
strong feelings:
Extract from letter dated 10 April 1941:
I received your letter today about my children’s. I cannot understand why I cannot have them back before I come down to Sydney from place name omitted. Mr B said the chil- dren weren’t taken away through no fault of my mine [. . .] It is very hard when a mother can’t have her childrens, it breaks my heart every time I go and visits them. They always ask when I am going to take them home.
Extract from letter dated 11 June 1941:
I can’t see why the mother can’t have first preference. She did say she’ll leave them in the home till after the winter months are over. Seeing as they are boarded she’d take them as we cannot even visit them now, don’t know where they are.
Extract from letter dated 12 November 1941:
I am waiting for a reply as it is only 5 weeks to Christmas. I would like to have my childrens home for xmas.
Many of these letters went unanswered, and Patrick’s parents were not the only ones
who did not receive replies, nor were they the only ones who never saw their children
again. Lying in the archives, waiting on sons and daughters to finally probe and see the
dark hues of parental grief, the letters provide proof of the traumatic nature of
removal. Indeed, Peter Read (1996: 49) even tells us that the official’s comments on
some of these letters and documentation continue to haunt him, he writes, “I can
still see ‘no answer required’ written across a mother’s request to see her child”.
Written into the margins of these documents of removal then as Read tells us is
further proof of the colonial logic of Aboriginal child removal. The comments on
the side of many of my respondents’ letters and files create an alternate supplementary
space where the traces, intimacies, and subjectivities of the officials involved in Abori-
ginal child removal provide further evidence of the racist modes of governmentality
which enabled the attempted destruction of Aboriginal communities. In a broader
sense, the multi-layered nature of documents across time highlight as Achille
Mbembe (2002) reminds us that the archive is intimately tied to the notion of
death, and that its “final destination” is always situated outside its own materiality,
and is thus, I argue, embedded in a political and social life where a fluid changing
art of interpretation re-configures what lies within.
Visiting the archive also then becomes a way of re-establishing broken connections
with the past, and many of my respondents spoke openly about viewing their files and
records for the first time. Emily, one of my closest respondents, always excelled at
school, and when she went to the archives in search of her files, she told me that
she was described in some sections of the reports to the Aboriginal Welfare Board
as “stupid” and “unwilling to learn”. Emily’s story flags the pervasive official misread-
ing of Aboriginal children in the documentation of the time. The “truth” which
emerged from how she existed as a documented fact juxtaposed with the reality of
488 F. Murphy
her memories and achievements at school reveal the contradictions inherent in the
archival space. Confronted with the official version of who she was as a child, and
one might add, forced to live between two conflicting “realities”, Emily felt anger
and resentment; it was a story which she told me many times. It is a story which
points to the archive as a place encapsulating the politics of assimilation, a place
where the tensions and negative attitudes of colonial time past lie in waiting. The
story/stories of the Stolen Generations and their relationship to the archive, to
the documents withheld there, and indeed to the institutions themselves, point to
the need to reconceptualize the archive in broader terms. Outside of the traditional
conception as the archive as a storehouse of documents, facts, fictions, and memories;
there is, I posit, space to reflect on the significance of objects, even architectural struc-
tures, as possible ways of archiving. For Emily and Patrick, the site and place of the
archive was reconstructed as a site of trauma, with the documents contained therein
further compounding the pain of their encounter with the past.
For some of my other respondents, Patrick included, reading descriptions about
their parents written by the welfare board was also very hurtful and destructive. The
following is an extract from one such report:
Extract from report dated 25 March 1941:
Whether Mrs W is a desirable person to have custody of her children is questionable. The District Secretary (area omitted) reported on the 22/11/40 (see file) that she was addicted to drink. Gambling and loose-living, and had deserted her children. The manager of (place name omitted) reported on 26.11.40 (see file), that she had been cruelly ill- treated by her husband, a drunkard, who confiscated all the money he could get to spend on drink.
Being confronted with starkly negative images of their parents has been a pernicious
experience for many of my respondents. The story of Patrick’s parents seems to be an
altogether different one when one reads their letters and career references; Mr. W had a
successful career in the military, one which certainly belies how the Aboriginal Welfare
Board represented him. Waiting in the archives, then, are ghosts with a consummate
ability to unsettle by awakening the humiliation and injustices of the past. Through
reading and re-interpreting archival documents the currents of power underlying
Aboriginal child removal became clearer to my many respondents. The practice of
re-reading in the archive undergirds the impossibility of immutable truths and the
possibility, fluidity, and contingent nature of meaning in the archival space. Re-
reading archival documents to the backdrop of the reconciliation movement and
the history wars (see Moses 2004), meant many members of the Stolen Generations
better understood the kinds of personal and collective loss and humiliation engen-
dered through the “official” practice of removal. Many of my respondents confronted
this materialized humiliation in the documents, letters, and files kept by the State; the
kind of “malice in the archive” which in his review of Derrida’s Archive Fever, Herman
Rapaport (1998) discusses. In the French original, “mal d’archive” has two possible
meanings, one being the English translation “archive fever”. This signals both the fren-
zied recording of the past which many nation-states undertake, or the feverish hunt to
History and Anthropology 489
find something. The second, Rapaport argues, could be the idea of, “malice in the
archive”, the evil or malice, or demons, who wait unsuspectingly to be uncovered or
passed onto future generations. Rapaport looks to the example of the Holocaust to
make his point about archive trauma clear. Pointing to the way in which the Nazis
painstakingly “archived their evil” for future generations who, “may inherit the
legacy of their evil as evil”, Rapaport elaborates on the archive as a site both of
trauma and of violence (Derrida 1998). My informants, too, uncovered a similar
kind of malice. Emily’s self-image of a young student who worked hard and did
well at school was vanquished by racist overtones; because she was an Aboriginal
child, the authorities did not allow her success in posterity. The image of Patrick’s
mother, depicted as a “loose” and “immoral” woman, proved too difficult for
Patrick and his family to deal with. Peter Read too tells us that what he read in the
archive continued to haunt him even while sitting on the grass near the beautiful
Sydney harbour, he intimates towards the complex zone of affect reached through
work and research in the archive, particularly the Australian “colonial” archive
which is intimately connected to heated political debates about past treatment of
Aboriginal groups, reconciliation and the issue of reparations, he writes:
Often able to absorb no more, I used to sit on the grassy slope outside the State Archives Office at Circular Quay, my heart pounding at the import of the records so casually recounting the destruction of a seemingly endless succession of Aboriginal Aus- tralians, returning to the desk still shaken, to recount wide-eyed what I had just read to any unfortunate friend or acquaintance who happened to be working at the Archives. (Read 1996: 49)
Archives therefore are sufficiently potent in posterity to reopen old wounds, looming
in their ghostly afterlife over the lost and the forgotten who search ambivalently for
home, for belonging, or for answers to nebulous questions about “what happened”.
The sinking feeling many of my respondents had when reading such poisoned and poi-
sonous “accounts” of their official memory was of being eviscerated; their emotional
resolve leached from them in dark quiet rooms, surrounded by reams of documen-
tation. The social and political life of objects, then, lends itself to as stimulating a dis-
cussion as the political life of documents, and so must not be overlooked in any
possible reflection on the archive and its uses. The materiality of the file and of the
object, its tangibility and potentialities, position themselves in a way which allows
us to consider the archive as a composite, paradoxical space which is in one and the
same moment both benign and dangerous.
The BTH Oral History Archive
Many members of the Stolen Generations have, however, a somewhat paradoxical
relationship to the archive. This is perhaps most visible when one examines the
dual manner in which some members of the Stolen Generations utilize the archival
space. Patrick spent many hours collecting the remnants of his story stored in the
public archives, becoming in fact a curator of his personal history as well as one of
490 F. Murphy
the many histories of Aboriginal Australia. Patrick also, however, told his story to the
BTH Oral History archive. While the archive, as I hope to have shown, is a site of
trauma, it is also a site of memory and hope. The attempt to reconstruct an alternative
non-State archive of removal in the Australian National Library is also an attempt to
de-centre the story of removal and as such to reconfigure the story of Australia’s past
treatment of Indigenous communities. For some of my respondents having their per-
sonal story recorded and archived was seen as an important step in preserving their
stories for future generations, thus contributing to an Australian collective and
national memory which had hitherto denied the story of Aboriginal child removal.
It was deemed a correction, in part, to the half truths and lies residing in many of
Australia’s State archives. The Bringing Them Home Oral History Collection was a
formative part of many of my respondent’s journey into storytelling and testimony.
It was instigated as a result of one of the recommendations made by the BTH
inquiry, and the Australian National Library was subsequently allocated Governmental
funding to create the project.3 Forty-one interviewers were employed, seventeen being
of an Indigenous background, as well as the project manager, Doreen Mellor.4
I was told by those who had been interviewed by the library that the whole process
had been an incredibly healing one, and for those whose stories were published in the
Many Voices Collection (Haebich & Mellor 2002), a book which presented snippets of
the interviews and photos of the contributors, seeing their stories in print proved
liberating. Many of my respondents, who had not given their testimony to the BTH
inquiry, decided that they could speak to and be interviewed by the National Library.
Contributing to what was deemed a comprehensive public record of the removal
experience in a safe setting (with interviews usually taking place in the interviewee’s
home or neighbourhood) was seen as a form of liberation by many of my respondents.
One of these, Jimmy told me that he did not feel ready to tell his story to the BTH
Commission of Inquiry, but by the time the report had been published, and people
began to speak about it, he had begun to deal with what had happened to him:
I just could not think about being removed. My time in the homes haunted me, but I kept it all bottled up. I did not want to talk to my wife and children about it. Some of my chil- dren when they were younger did not even realize they were Aboriginal and I allowed that to go on. When the adverts appeared in the Koori Mail asking people to come to the commission to tell their stories, I could not face it. By the time the report was published, we had begun to discuss it as a family. I was able to deal with what had happened to me by speaking about it with my children, my daughter especially. I told my story to the National Library because I felt it was the right time. I was finally able to talk publicly. Something happened to me because of the report and all the debates about it.
Jimmy’s story highlights the importance of “alternative” archives such as the BTH col-
lection which acts as a counterpoint to State or official archives, as well as providing a
space for individuals to embed their very powerful personal oral histories in Australian
collective memory and history. These alternative archives in a way act as potent ciphers
for national redemption as they provide a place where storytelling and voice are pri-
vileged above documents and fact, thereby acting as a kind of “countermemorial”
(Young 1993) to the monolithic narrative of the nation – state. Jimmy’s story also
History and Anthropology 491
reveals the potency of personal encounters with the archive and their transformative
nature.
While the focus in this article has very much been on the impact of the archive on
trauma survivors, in this instance, members of the Stolen Generations, the effect of
Stolen Generation’s narratives on those who worked to collect them should not be
understated. Over the course of my research , I interviewed seven of the BTH project’s
oral historians. Ann-Mari Jordan, one of the project’s interviewers and researchers,
has written extensively on her experiences of working with narratives of suffering.
She writes:
When I joined the BTH project, in its pilot phase, I expected I would only be asked to interview white administrators, as I had undertaken a number of interviews with immigration department administrators (particularly social workers) for my books on immigration. I felt most honoured (and not a little nervous) when I was asked to inter- view Oomera Edwards, the woman who had founded Linkup (a tracing agency for removed children). It was a great interview and it gave me the confidence to interview other former separated children. I was pleased that I could even interview people who had suffered dreadful abuse—that they had confidence in me, despite the vast gulf between our life experiences. I have always felt very enriched and privileged by the opportunity the Project gave me to get to know such special people so intimately (if briefly). It has been my gateway into Aboriginal Australia [. . .] I am optimistic that Australia is now very different from the society in which I grew up. I have great hopes that the BTH project will eventually achieve the great aims its planners hoped for. (Email correspondence 2006)
Ann-Mari’s continued interest and hope in what the BTH oral project could achieve
has seen her conduct further research on the use of the project. In a recent research
project in which I participated, she concluded that the BTH project could achieve
much more if it was made more accessible. She argues for an institution like the Smith-
sonian museum for Native Americans to be created to house the collection, and create
more awareness of the history of Indigenous Australians. Over the course of my field-
work, I met with and interviewed six other members of the project, including the
project manager Doreen Mellor.5 All expressed similar sentiments about the project
to Ann-Mari, and many cited feeling apprehensive about the nature of the stories to
which they had to listen. While the question of whether testimony can truly achieve
healing and reconciliation remains in dispute, I would argue that the creation of the
BTH Oral History Collection serves as a site of memory and healing for both the Indi-
genous and non-Indigenous communities. Telling a story, knowing it will be archived
for posterity, seeing it in published form, and seeing it utilized for further research
were all pinpointed as important motivations for speaking to the oral history collec-
tion. On receipt of additional funding from the Department of Families, Housing,
Community Services and Indigenous Affairs in 2009 – 2010, the library has engaged
in a digitization project of the collection of interviews as well as re-interviewing
those willing to reflect on the years since the initial interview (particularly important
given the impact of the Rudd National Apology and various successful reparations
claims). This digitization points to what one might call a democratization of the
BTH archive, making many of its interviews available across the globe. Indeed, as a
492 F. Murphy
number of other pieces in this special edition argue, digital documents change who can
access, collect, and gather information. The BTH oral history collection is a pivotal
space of history and memory, one which speaks to the absences and losses engendered
by colonial practice, and as such, will play a key role in future remembrance and mem-
orialization of traumatic time past. Indeed, while much of this piece has aimed to
stress the manner in which archives work against themselves, projects like the BTH
oral history collection, and other attempts to archive by survivors of trauma and so
on, evinces the view that archiving also holds great potentialities, equipping survivors
with a sense that their experiences can finally be given voice, and stored for future
generations. 6
Conclusion
As we have seen from the stories of Patrick, Emily, and Jimmy many members of the
Stolen Generations return to the archive to search for what has been removed from
them—places, people, and worlds—often to encounter revenants of a traumatic
time past. They go to the archive in search of answers that will lead them home.
They go in search of origins of many kinds. Carolyn Steedman tells us in her reflections
on the potency of the archive that “archive fever” is in fact a pulsating desire to, “find
and possess all sorts of beginnings” (Steedman 2001: 1). The archive is a site which
although it embraces beginnings and origins—it is the place in which past, present,
and future reside uncomfortably together—it is, nevertheless, also where these
“origins” remain numinous. The archive holds trauma for the state and the victim,
but the archive traumatizes too; the possibility for damage emanates from the
desire, impossible to attain, to locate a site of “absolute commencement”. Archives
quickly become little more than fragments, ones in which we can never truly know
what therein lies. As a site where the fragments of trauma and loss accumulate, the
archive is a place which bespeaks the presence of absence, it is Agamben’s (1999:
144) “dark margin”, which encircles, limits, and underlines the semantic. Nicolas
Abraham, too, reminds us that, “what haunts are not the dead, but the gaps left
within us by the secrets of others” (1994: 171).
For Stolen Generations, the archive is just such a place of secrets, lies, and truth
enshrined in documents, letters, and unopened files. The archive is also the site
where trauma resists, awaiting those willing to bring it to the light; it is the place
where Lyotards’ (1984) “petit recit”, or little stories lie in waiting to challenge the
master narrative of the nation-state. To begin the journey “home”, the archive is
one of the first sites of visitation, a place which will yield partial knowledge about
an unknown past and a possible future. For Patrick and his daughter Amy, the
archive has led them on a journey through wounded sites of memory, family myths,
and earnest truths to where they can finally find peace in a place that they feel they
can call home. The archive, finally, is a site of contradiction, engendering ambivalence
among members of Stolen Generations. It does not offer up resolution and peace, or
answer our questions about the past; rather it is a space of conflict. A space whereupon
reflection offers to us a lesson about the dangers of re-navigating the past, whether an
History and Anthropology 493
individual exploration or an attempt to reconstruct it historically. Perhaps even as
much, it teaches those of us who write and do history and anthropology, how perilous
our projects of reconstruction, interpretation, and representation can be, whether our
research be ethnographic or archival or indeed both. Finally then, the archive in the
Australian context should be deemed a place which stands as a testament to the suffer-
ing and experiences of Aboriginal Australians-in particular that of child removal. It is,
I believe, a place where many ghosts lie in waiting, ghosts whom when spoken to may
remedy the past, and the kind who should not be disturbed for their sullen intransi-
gence may only do more harm.
Notes
[1] While the nomenclature, “Stolen Generations”, has been disputed by some, it is the term by which those individuals who suffered under removal policies have come to describe them- selves. The collective term, lost generations, which was coined in the early 1980s by historian Peter Read, to describe those who had been removed from their families, was transformed into Stolen Generations. Because of my informants close identification with this term, and its important historical significance, I will use it throughout this article to describe those who were removed. I will also use the term in the plural to denote the transgenerational impact of the policies. I will not engage with the debate on whether the word “Stolen”, is an accurate way to capture what happened to Indigenous Australians. I do wish to posit, however, that “Stolen”, does not just describe the manner in which Aboriginal children were removed from their families, but more acutely, captures the idea that, in being removed from their families, Aboriginal children had many things stolen from them, such as family, language, and Aboriginal lifeworlds
[2] On a personal level then, my own voyage into the archival space to rediscover my grandfather and grandaunts’ fate in an equally disturbing system of containment and institutionalization in Ireland began to mirror my research participants’ journeys, thus allowing me a more pro- found emotional as well as philosophical understanding and connection to what the archival space was offering up to those negotiating loss and pain.
[3] Recommendation 1 of the BTH (1997) report argued: “That the Council of Australian Gov- ernments ensure the adequate funding of appropriate Indigenous agencies to record, preserve and administer access to the testimonies of Indigenous people affected by the forcible removal policies who wish to provide their histories in audio, audio-visual or written form”.
[4] My work focused on the actual interviews which are a collection of recorded interviews with not only members of the Stolen Generations, but also those involved in the removals, ironi- cally known as “protectors”, parents who lost children, and also those who adopted them.
[5] Of the seven people I met with three were Indigenous and four were non-Indigenous. [6] Giving voice of course acquires a literality when we reflect on the digitization of projects like
the Bringing Them Home Oral History Archive, thus opening up other avenues of discussion around the idea of the digital archive and its relationship to future interpretation and meaning.
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