CRITICAL ARCHIVES: NEW INTERPRETATIONS, NEW PRACTIVES AND NEW LIVES FOR ARCHIVAL

MATERIALS

DAY 1: Monday 13th November

LOCATION: Burwood Corporate Centre (BC) 2ND FLOOR. When you enter the Burwood Corporate

Centre, come up to the reception on level 2 and we will show you the conference room.

8.30 am 9.00 – 9.30am

Registrations. Complimentary Tea and coffee available in BC WELCOME TO COUNTRY WELCOME TO THE CONFERENCE

9.30 -10.30am Room BC KEYNOTE 1: Professor Tony Ballantyne From Colonial Collection to 'Tribal Knowledge Base': the Lives of the Archives of Herries Beattie Chair: Emma Kowal

10.30-11.00AM MORNING TEA (BC)

11am – 1pm Room BC Interpreting the Archive: Emma Kowal; Diana Young; Maria Nugent; Amanda Lourie Chair: Katie Wood

Room L1.08 (LT10) Archives and Place: Billy Griffiths; Bronwyn Shepherd; Melissa Harpley; Tiffany Shellam Chair: Ben Shepherd

1.00-1.45pm LUNCH (BC)

1.45-3.45pm Room BC Archives and Justice Elfie Shiosaki; Julie Evans and Joanna Cruickshank; Lara Fullenwieder and Adam Molnar; Kirsten Wright Chair: Chris Owen

3.45-4.15pm AFTERNOON TEA (BC)

4.15-5.15pm Room BC KEYNOTE 2: Dr Natalie Harkin Archival Poetics: A Decolonial Offering Chair: Elfie Shiosaki

*CONFERENCE DINNER AT Burwood East Tepinyaki House, 145 Burwood Highway, Burwood

East

DAY 2: Tuesday 14th November

9.00-10.00am Room BC KEYNOTE 3: Professor Jeannette Bastian Unlocking the Archives and Decolonizing the Records Chair: Rachel Buchanan

10.00-10.30am MORNING TEA (BC)

10.30am-12.30pm Room BC Behind the Archive: Gavan McCarthy; Richard Pennell; Alistair Paterson and Andrea Witcomb; Helen Gardner and Jason Gibson Chair: Tiffany Shellam

Room B1.20 (LT 11) Access and Agency: Nick Thieberger; Annelie de Villiers; Lindy Allen Chair: Jo Cruickshank

12.30-1.15 pm LUNCH (BC)

1.15-2.15pm Room BC KEYNOTE 4: Dr Chris Owen A Journey through the Western Australian Archives Chair: Melinda Hinkson

2.15-2.45pm AFTERNOON TEA (BC)

2.45 – 4.45pm Room BC From Archive to Performance: Clint Bracknell; Sharon Huebner; Ann Vickery; Michael Aird Chair: Hallie Shellam

4.45-5.45PM Room BC KEYNOTE 5: Dr Rachel Buchanan How to Listen to a record: metadata, affect, ethics and the Iran Album Chair: Natalie Harkin

*Please note that parking is available in CP1 and HH and HG (see map), and the Vermont South

tram no.75 stops outside building BC

ABSTRACTS and BIOS KEYNOTES Tony Ballantyne, From Colonial Collection to 'Tribal Knowledge Base': the Lives of the Archives of Herries Beattie Herries Beattie began collecting and writing about the history of southern New Zealand during his youth in the 1890s and remained active through to his death in 1972. He was a prolific author, regularly producing books, pamphlets, and newspaper columns on the natural history, toponymy, exploration, and colonisation of Otago and Southland. He was especially interested in the indigenous traditions of the region and in the development of its principal Maori iwi (tribe), Kai Tahu whanui. This paper explores the development of Beattie's intellectual routines, stressing the importance of his personal construction of a mixed archive of handwritten notes, newspaper clippings, interviews and objects in his writing practice. It then traces the ways in which he directed the deposit and institutionalisation of these collections late in his career, using these decisions to suggest some ways in which we might understand how he conceived of the structure of his intellectual endeavours and the ways in which he imagined his collections would be used in the future. The final section of the paper focuses on how the collection has been mobilised, especially the significance of parts of his collection in Te Kereme, the Ngai Tahu Claims to the Waitangi Tribunal and its subsequent emergence as a key element in the iwi's efforts to construct a useful, accessible, and culturally meaningful set of archives as part of what the great Ngai Tahu scholar and leader Sir Tipene O'Regan has dubbed a 'tribal knowledge base'. BIO: Tony Ballantyne is a Professor of History at the University of Otago, where is Co-Director of the Centre for Research on Colonial Culture, and Pro-Vice-Chancellor Humanities. He has published widely on the cultural history of the British empire in the long nineteenth century, while much of his recent work has focused on the colonisation of New Zealand (including his most recent book, Entanglements of Empire: Missionaries, Maori and the Question of the Body). Questions about knowledge production, the development of archives, and how historians imagine and uses archival collections have been central to much of his work. Natalie Harkin Archival-poetics | a decolonial offering The colonial archive, particularly the state’s Aboriginal records, trigger questions on surveillance, representation and agency. They bear witness to colonial processes of knowledge-formation; they reveal the influence of power in determining how social meaning comes to be represented on this historical record, and what remains formally absented. A burgeoning field of archival research is concerned with the need to access, utilise and respond to such archives from diverse and localised Indigenous standpoints. Archival-poetics is a creative methodology of resistance and transformation that developed over many years engaging with multiple archive repositories in order to investigate aspects of my Aboriginal family story; this includes state-shaped assimilation policies, particularly those targeting Aboriginal girls for removal from their families, and enabling indentured domestic labour. This work is an active, embodied reckoning with key sites of memory, conservation,

preservation and erasure that continue to resonate. It considers questions of access, transparency and affect concerning archives that are often sites of trauma and pain for Aboriginal people whose voices and experiences have largely been excluded. Archival-poetics also developed ekphrastically in response to Indigenous artists and writers who engage with such records, and who reflect on family and community experiences informed by complex stories of racial dominance and oppression, and of survival, agency and resilience. Such artistic and literary interventions offer something new that is ultimately and overwhelmingly about love. This paper presents four inter-textual, mixed-media installation works that move across poetry, prose and performative visual art practice. It aims to expand critical narratives of history beyond the colonial archive and those fixed disciplines that have largely (mis)represented, objectified and excluded Indigenous perspectives and voice. Four threads weave and bind this work: Blood Memory as a narrative tactic; Dimensions of Haunting as a way of knowing; the paradox and violence of the Colonial Archive; and the creative resilience and significance of Grandmother Stories. BIO: Natalie is a Narungga woman from South Australia. She is an academic and activist-poet with an interest in the state’s colonial archives and Aboriginal family records. Her words have been installed and projected in exhibitions comprising text-object-video projection. She has written for Overland, Southerly, TEXT and Cordite, and her first poetry manuscript, Dirty Words, was published by Cordite Books in 2015. Jeannette A. Bastian Unlocking the Archives and Decolonizing the Records The term ‘decolonization’ refers both to the removal of domination by colonial forces within the geographical spaces and institutions of the colonized, and to a ‘decolonizing of the mind’ from the colonizers' beliefs, constraints and authority. For archives professionals in both settler nations with indigenous or alienated communities and those postcolonial nations and peoples casting off the legacies of oppression, recognizing and acknowledging the wide multiplicity of records and cultural expressions that form cultural heritages and identities have become a major issues in the 21st century. Confronting the archival challenges presented by decolonizing the records demands on the one hand, a mindset that is willing to directly interact with those challenges unmediated by the strictures and formalities of pre-set concepts, and on the other, an openness to reconsider the very nature of records, records creation and records ownership. This presentation will explore these issues and the ways in which archivists are expanding and reshaping traditional theory and practice to bring a decolonial mindset into the archives. BIO: Jeannette A. Bastian is a Professor at the School of Library and Information Science,

Simmons College where she directs their Archives Management concentration. Formerly

Territorial Librarian of the United States Virgin Islands from1987 to 1998, she completed an

MLS from Shippensburg State University, an M.Phil. in Caribbean literature at the University

of the West Indies (Mona, Jamaica) in 1983 and a Ph.D. focusing on archives, from the

University of Pittsburgh in 1999. She is widely published in the archival literature and her

books include West Indian Literature, A Critical Index, 1930-1975 (1982), Owning Memory,

How a Caribbean Community Lost Its Archives and Found Its History (2003), Archival

Internships (2008), Community Archives, The Shaping of Memory, ed. with Ben Alexander

(2009), and Archives in Libraries; What Librarians and Archivists Need to Know to Work

Together, with Megan Sniffin-Marinoff and Donna Webber (2015). She is currently compiling

and co-editing a ‘Caribbean Archives Reader’ to support a new Masters in Archival Studies at

the University of the West Indies.

Chris Owen A Journey through the Western Australian Archives In Western Australia, colonial and later variously named state government departments managed many aspects of Aboriginal people’s lives. In the 1800s this was achieved through policing (often of dubious legality) and institutionalisation by various religious denominations. After the passing of the 1905 Aborigines Act (that sought to regulate Aboriginal/European liaisons and marriages among other things) the management and surveillance of Aboriginal people became more acute. After the appointment of Chief Protector of Aborigines AO Neville in 1915 this administrative system, under the direction of the Aborigines Department, was further expanded to create what were called ‘Personal Files’ with corresponding ‘Personal history cards’ of every Aboriginal person in the state. There are over 21 000 of these files (each often up to 200 pages long) documenting, in invasive and minute detail, their extended family, ‘character’, racial classification within legislation, requests for permission to marry, removal to institutions, requests for citizenship, and any medical treatment. These files continued in various forms until 1972. After 1992 under strict privacy considerations relatives of those mentioned could apply to access these files held by the Department of Child Protection and Family Services. In 2017 these files were transferred in digital form to the Department of Local Government, Sport and Cultural Industries (previously the Department of Aboriginal Affairs) Aboriginal History Research Unit (AHRU). The importance of these files is the detail about the identity of fathers of children of Aboriginal women that AO Neville so assiduously sought to identify. (Usually European pastoralists and station workers.) The AHRU can use this detailed material to create the most complete family history (including genealogies created with new digital technology) for many people who were removed to institutions or often do not know who their parents and ancestors are (often refereed to as the ‘Stolen Generations’). This talk will explore the process and reveal how digitisation has made it possible to explore the archives in a matter of minutes in what would have taken previously a matter of months.

BIO: Dr. Chris Owen is a historian and Honorary Research Fellow in the School of History at the University of Western Australia. He is the author of ‘Every mother’s son is guilty’: Policing the Kimberley frontier of Western Australia 1882-1905, Nedlands, UWAP, 2016. His research interests, utilising primarily archival state records, include colonial policing (specifically the Kimberley), Aboriginal policy and governmental administration and the social conditions at the frontiers of colonisation in Western Australia. He is also a Senior Researcher at the Department of Local Government, Sport and Cultural Industries in the Aboriginal History Research Unit who utilises archival State Records to provide family history services, historical records and genealogies for Aboriginal people seeking information relating to their family members. Rachel Buchanan

How to listen to a record: metadata, affect, ethics and the Iran Album In 1973, Her Imperial Highness Princess Ashraf Pahlavi – the twin sister of the Shah – invited three distinguished foreign women to visit her country as guests of the Women’s Association of Iran. Germaine Greer, Betty Friedan and Helvi Sipila, an assistant secretary general of the United Nations, were the chosen three. The Germaine Greer Archive, which is housed at University of Melbourne Archives, includes a handsome photographic album that was gifted to Greer as a souvenir of this incongruous journey. This talk uses the Trip to Iran Photograph Album to argue that the creation of detailed, item-level description is a way of sharing, preserving and transmitting the diffuse, ephemeral but valuable ‘ambient knowledge’ held within teams of archivists and the institutions in which we work. The Iran Album is a case study into how research and outreach conducted by archivists can restore or create new webs of affective responsibility for records and the communities they document. My research has created detailed metadata that provides a more ethical, rich and accurate foundation for future research projects. This work draws on kaupapa Maori research methodologies and on the work of archivists and archival studies theorists. BIO: Dr Rachel Buchanan (Taranaki, Te Ati Awa) is curator, Germaine Greer Archive, at University of Melbourne Archives. She is the author of Stop Press: the last days of newspapers (Scribe, 2014) and The Parihaka Album (Huia, 2010). The Parihaka book is named after a photographic album at the Alexander Turnbull Library. The book and subsequent essays, especially an essay on shame and apology, have been used by both Taranaki iwi and Crown negotiators in Treaty of Waitangi claim settlements. An essay on the Iran Album will be published in Archivaria, the Journal of the Association of Canadian Archivists, in December 2017.

PRESENTERS Michael Aird, Photographs and the questions they pose In 2014 I curated an exhibition titled Captured: Early Brisbane photographers and their Aboriginal subjects, at the Museum of Brisbane. This exhibition took an in depth look at a series of over 180 photographs of Aboriginal people taken in Brisbane in the 1860s and 1870s. These images reflect a time when Aboriginal people still had a degree of control over their lives, it was a time prior to the introduction of a series of racist ‘protection’ legislations that were imposed upon Aboriginal society from the late 1890s until the 1970s. Through extensive archival research I was able to identify the names of the photographers for all 180 photographs in the exhibition. Even though I could not attach names to the majority of people in the images, the fact that the photographers were identified enabled me to at least confirm that the 300 or more Aboriginal people in the photographs were all in Brisbane at one point in time. This simple fact of knowing when and where somebody was photographed is a good starting point to then ask more questions, such as, who are these people and how can we learn more about them. My presentation will discuss how the Captured exhibition challenged the viewer into thinking about the people in these photographs, to think about why they chose to allow themselves to be photographed and to ask questions about where was their traditional country and the lives they lived more generally. BIO: Michael Aird has worked in the area of Aboriginal arts and cultural heritage since 1985, graduating in 1990 with a Bachelor of Arts in Anthropology from the University of Queensland. Michael has worked in professional positions and as a freelance researcher, curator and publisher. His main research focus has been photographic history with a particular interest in native title and Aboriginal people of southeast Queensland. He has curated over 25 exhibitions, including curating Transforming Tindale at the State Library of Queensland in 2012, which was the first time photographs taken by Norman Tindale and Joseph Birdsell on their 1938 and 1939 expedition have been featured in a major exhibition. In 2014 he curated the Captured: Early Brisbane Photographers and Their Aboriginal Subjects exhibition at the Museum of Brisbane. In 1996 he established Keeaira Press an independent publishing house and has produced over 35 books. Much of what Keeaira Press has published focus on art and photography, which reflects Michael’s interest in recording aspects of urban Aboriginal history and culture. Michael is currently an ARC Research Fellow in Anthropology at the School of Social Science at The University of Queensland. Lindy Allen Reconnecting, Re-Reading and Re-Interrogating the Archival Record The cultural legacy of Indigenous Australians is dispersed across many public collections in Australia. It constitutes a huge and very significant component of this nation’s cultural heritage. Yet most often, the archival record including images and written records often sits in isolation of other related material, in particular to cultural objects to which they directly relate. These will sit physically and conceptually separated, even within the same institution, but are most often disperse across a separate institutions, at times in different states and territories or even overseas. This dislocation and disassociation does not easily allow for the

true historical and cultural significance of any component of this heritage material to emerge without direct intervention. These interventions have come in the past few decades in Australia through the engagement of Indigenous people with their cultural patrimony. It resulted in a rethinking of our approach to research on collections and embedded it within a collaborative cross-cultural and cross-disciplinary framework. This has required a dialogic approach that elicits multiple and differing perspectives of the ‘things’ in collections, and allows for new and old knowledge to emerge and converge, and for meanings and value of these ‘things’ to be negotiated, and for alternative narratives to be created. This paper explores a collaboration between Museums Victoria and Daygurrgurr clan elders ─ George Milaybuma and the late Dr Joe Gumbula – whose cultural patrimony at Museum Victoria includes two bark paintings collected by the Melbourne based anthropologist Donald Thomson at Buckingham Bay in Arnhem Land in 1937. I discuss here how various elements of the record were critically examined and disentangled and reconnected to paintings that had not been considered particularly significant given their poor condition; and how as a consequence their status shifted dramatically to ‘inalienable possessions’. BIO: Lindy Allen is Senior Curator (Anthropology - Northern Australian Indigenous Collections) at Museums Victoria. Having worked in the museum industry for 40 years, she has developed an active and focused research program on Indigenous collections working in collaboration with Indigenous communities, mainly Arnhem Land and Cape York, and with the university sector. She is Partner Investigator on ARC Linkage Projects LP160100415: How Meston's “Wild Australia Show” Shaped Australian Aboriginal History; and LP130100346: The Legacy of 50 Years Collecting at Milingimbi. Her publications include co-editing the volumes The Makers and Making of Indigenous Australian Museum Collections (MUP 2008) and The Photographs of Baldwin Spencer (MUP 2005), and chapters in Unpacking the Collection (Springer 2010), Land and Language in Cape York Peninsula and the Gulf Country, Culture and Language Use (John Benjamins, 2016), Conciliation on Colonial Frontiers (Routledge 2014), and Donald Thomson: Man and Scholar (Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia, 2005). Clint Bracknell Out of the archives and onto the tongue: singing old Noongar songs Developing old recordings of Aboriginal songs to the spiritual, emotional and intellectual point at which an endangered language community can breathe life into them again requires a necessarily gradual process, enhanced by the cultural, genealogical and geographical connections between the people, songs and Country involved. Since early 2017, community workshops have been undertaken to recirculate archival audio recordings of Noongar songs from the south coast of Western Australia with younger relatives of the singers on the original tapes as well as local language and cultural experts. These workshops have involved three main activities, including:

• Multilayered interpretation of Noongar-language lyrics;

• Collection of metadata not found in the archives about particular songs, singers and the country concerned, and;

• Consideration of suitable aesthetics for the performance of old songs originally recorded by researchers as ‘elicitations’ rather than fully-fledged performances.

Working with archival Noongar song sources has involved multiple layers of interpretation and questioning, due to uncertainties introduced by:

• Ambient noise and poor microphone quality and technique leading to unclear or muffled archival recordings;

• Incomplete recording of elicitation sessions leading to questions as to the extent to which the researcher could have misheard or misinterpreted information given by the original singer;

• Incomplete song text transcriptions, idiosyncratic handwriting and unusual orthography in the written record, and;

• The absence of percussion in recordings of songs that may have originally included reasonably complex percussive accompaniment and dance.

With an agreed aim of producing performable repertoire, many of these uncertainties need to be resolved one way or another within the group. While this undertaking would be impossible without the archive, its realisation is completely reliant on the expertise and creativity of the Noongar people involved. BIO: Dr Clint Bracknell is a songwriter, musician and ethnomusicologist. He coordinates the contemporary music program at Sydney Conservatorium of Music, The University of Sydney and his key research interests include the sustainability of Aboriginal Australian song and the continued global impact of popular music. His current ARC-funded Indigenous Discovery project (2017-2019) ‘Mobilising song archives to nourish an endangered Aboriginal language’ focuses on the endangered Noongar language of the south-west of Western Australia and explores the potential for song to assist in addressing the national and global crisis of Indigenous language-loss. His Aboriginal family from the south-east coast of Western Australia use the term ‘Wirlomin Noongar’ to refer to their clan and his Robert Street Prize-awarded PhD at the University of Western Australia (2013-2015) focused on the aesthetics and sustainability of Noongar song. Sydney Conservatorium of Music, The University of Sydney Joanna Cruickshank and Julie Evans Archival Relations: Lawful Encounters in the Past and Present Shaunaugh Dorsett and Shaun McVeigh have proposed the image of ‘meeting place of laws’ as useful in examining the historic encounters and engagements between Indigenous and colonial law, suggesting that it ‘allows us to understand something of the meaning of the conduct of lawful relations.’ This paper considers the place of colonial archives in providing evidence of such meeting places and how this evidence might contribute to a broader history of the conduct of lawful relations between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people. We draw on examples from a recently completed project, which focused on the Victorian Parliamentary Inquiry into the Coranderrk Aboriginal Reserve in 1881 and a new project which seeks to provide historical context for treaty negotiations in Victoria. BIOS: Julie Evans' teaching and research bring together law, history and criminology. She

was Lead CI of the Minutes of Evidence project (www.minutesofevidence.com.au) and, with

Joanna Cruickshank, is continuing to identify and examine archival evidence of Koori

peoples' assertion of sovereign to sovereign relations with an evolving colonial state.

Joanna Cruickshank is Senior Lecturer in History at Deakin University. Her research focuses on gender, race and religion in the British colonial world. As a CI on the Minutes of Evidence project and in ongoing work with Julie Evans, she examines the colonial archive for evidence of the meeting of Aboriginal and colonial systems of law. Annelie deVilliers Indigenous Knowledge Centres: Increasing Agency through Information Management Since Europeans first set foot in Canada, Australia and New Zealand, the Indigenous inhabitants of those lands have been researched in the name of scientific enquiry. A lack of sensitivity toward cultural difference and understanding of Indigenous epistemology resulted in misconceptions of Indigenous communities which still influence policy today. The legitimisation of knowledge occurs from a position of dominance. How can Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities address the power imbalance in the production and legitimisation of knowledge in ‘post-colonial’ Australia? The Kimberley Aboriginal Law and Culture Centre (KALACC) proposes to investigate, through this researcher, whether their establishment as a ‘knowledge centre’ through improved Information Management (IM) would increase their agency in dealings with colonial structures. BIO: Annelie de Villiers is a PhD candidate with Monash University where she is investigating the potential of Information Management for increasing the agency of Indigenous Australian communities. Annelie is Assistant Research Archivist at The University of Melbourne's eScholarship Research Centre where she works on Return, reconcile, renew: understanding the history, effects and opportunities of repatriation and building an evidence base for the future. Annelie completed her Masters' thesis on Personal Digital Archives for Aboriginal Children in Out-of-Home Care in 2016. Annelie was one of the eight recipients worldwide of the International Council of Archives New Professional bursary in 2016. Lara Fullenwieder and Adam Molner Truth, Reconciliation, and Privacy: Archiving State-based Violence through Canada's Indian Residential School Settlement Agreement In 2007, the Indian Residential School Settlement Agreement (IRSSA) was developed to redress the violent and assimilative history of residential schools in Canada. The records collected through the IRSSA represent the most comprehensive documentation of violence against Indigenous populations in Canada: data that ranges from personal testimonials and records, medical histories, and institutional documents, to tested legal statements regarding physical and sexual abuse and its effects. The implementation of IRSSA has been punctuated by legal conflicts which mobilize discourses and laws centering upon liberal-conceived rights concerning “access to information” and “privacy.” In this article, we examine how liberal discourses of privacy knowledge and uses of privacy law inform histories and futures of Indigenous and settler memory in the context of state-based violence. The article reveals how liberal notions of privacy, when mobilized alongside federally mandated policies of

“reconciliation,” may reproduce the structural violence of settler colonial governance in liberal democracies. BIOS: Adam Molnar is a Lecturer in the Department of Criminology at Deakin University, and is a member of the Alfred Deakin Institute for Citizenship and Globalisation. He received his PhD from the University of Victoria (Canada), and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Queen's University's Surveillance Studies Centre. His research focuses on the socio-legal aspects of surveillance, privacy, and social control, particularly as they relate to contemporary practices of policing and security governance. Lara Fullenwieder is a research associate at Alfred Deakin Institute for Citizenship and Globalisation. She recently received her Ph.D. in Cultural Studies from Queen’s University, Canada. Her thesis, entitled Unsettling Histories: Representation and Indigenous Creative Art Praxis in Official Indian Residential School Redress is an investigation of the role of visual strategies, art, and representation in reconciling Indian Residential School history in Canada. Her research interests include settler biopolitics, politics of representation, visual cultures, and critical settler methodologies.

Helen Gardner and Jason Gibson Archives as a problem to be solved: Nineteenth Century Ethnographic Records There is now significant literature on archives as institutions and instances of ‘truth regimes’ that demand innovative readings against the grain. There remains however a continued tendency to utilise these collections as sources of ‘knowledge’ without properly investigating their discursive, historical and dialogical origins. This is particularly so amongst repositories of early ethnographic records that are often mined, transcribed and forensically interrogated in search of linguistic of cultural data. In these instances archives are approached as a problem to be solved. The reader’s task is to find and excerpt nuggets of ‘knowledge’ in order for them to be made recognisable and practical. The following paper will explore this tendency towards empiricism within archival research, particularly within linguistics and anthropology, using examples from the ethnographic archives of the seminal Australian anthropologists A.W. Howitt and Lorimer Fison. We posit that while the details found in their archive are indeed rich, the ambiguity of the social and historical constitution of these papers should not be overlooked. The considerable interest and need for postcolonial reconstructions of early ethnographic materials, often to advance Indigenous rights or to inform cultural revivification in much of Australia, has meant that these archives are now plumbed for supporting data. As a result archives are now sites of considerable anxiety and complication, not only for researchers but for those administering their use, as they are often tackled in parts or segments rather being read holistically. BIOS: Jason Gibson is project manager for the ‘Howitt and Fison: Insights into Australian Aboriginal Language, Kinship and Culture’ ARC Linkage project with Deakin University and a curator with Humanities Department at the Melbourne Museum. Jason has worked extensively with Arandic peoples in Central Australia and his research focuses on the ethnographer/informant relationship and the reintegration of historical, audio-visual recordings of song and ritual into contemporary social lives. He has taught Indigenous Studies at Monash University and was previously a researcher with the Australian National

University’s Research School of Humanities and the Arts. He is currently working on a book concerning the making, reinterpretation and return of the ethnographic archive of the linguist and anthropologist T.G.H. Strehlow.

Helen Gardner is an Associate Professor of History in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at Deakin University. Her work both utilises and considers multi- disciplinary approaches in the history of anthropology and is focused on regional – Oceania - rather than national histories. She leads a team of linguists and anthropologists in a large ARC Linkage investigation into the complex archives of A. W. Howitt and Lorimer Fison, 19th century ethnographers of colonial Australia and the Pacific (LP160100192). Gardner’s most recent book, Southern Anthropology: A History of Fison and Howitt’s Kamilaroi and Kurnai, was co-authored with anthropologist Patrick McConvell and based on extensive archival research.

Billy Griffiths The cryptic residue of former worlds: towards a more archaeological understanding of Australian history In 1974, art historian Bernard Smith urged Australians to seek ‘a more balanced, a more archaeological, a more humanist view of our history’. Smith sought a historical enquiry that drew upon words, but which also moved beyond them to embrace the sensuous materiality of Australian history, encompassing the arts as well as artefacts. It is an inclusive approach that expands our understanding of ‘the archive’ and helps bring the deep and dynamic history of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples into Australian consciousness. This paper takes up Smith’s appeal and explores some of the practical, ethical and political challenges of reading history in the archive of the earth. Unlike the solitude of a library, an archaeological excavation is a very public event. It is marked by negotiation and collaboration and the knowledge it unearths is invariably contested. Working in this archive is simultaneously creative and destructive. Phillip Barker likens the act of excavation to ‘cutting pieces out of a hitherto unexamined manuscript, transcribing the fragments, and then destroying them.’ An archaeological site is a historical document that can be read once and once only. This paper follows a handful of Australian scholars who have sought to foster a more archaeological understanding of Australian history. It reflects on the human stories that can be read in landscapes and vegetation, percussion marks and plant residue, sediment and stone arrangements. BIO: Billy Griffiths is a Research Fellow at the Alfred Deakin Institute for Citizenship and Globalisation. He is the author of The China Breakthrough: Whitlam in the Middle Kingdom, 1971 and co-editor with Mike Smith of The Australian Archaeologist’s Book of Quotations. His forthcoming book, Deep Time Dreaming: Uncovering Ancient Australia (Black Inc., 2018), is a narrative history of Australian Indigenous archaeology. Melissa Harpley, Art, King George Sound and the Royal Navy Ten years separated the visits of John Sykes and William Westall to the shores of King George Sound. John Sykes, master’s mate on the Discovery under the command of George Vancouver spent some weeks at King George Sound in 1791. William Westall, Royal Academy

trained, was appointed landscape artist on the Investigator under the command of Matthew Flinders and made landfall at King George Sound in 1801. While there, both made images of the place as a record of their visit. Those images were later translated into printed form, and published as part of their commanders’ accounts of their expeditionary voyages, to be voraciously consumed by curious audiences in Britain. This paper will take as its starting point a close analysis of those images, seeking to establish the place they occupied in the greater mass of expeditionary images in circulation. How did they contribute to the creation of knowledge in Europe about the south-west corner of the Australian continent at the turn of the nineteenth-century? The paper will also seek to establish whether those images are more revealing to a contemporary audience when understood as belonging to the realm of documentary evidence, or as items shaped by aesthetic concerns. BIO: Melissa Harpley is the Curator of Historical and Modern Art and Manager of Curatorial Affairs at the Art Gallery of Western Australia. Her broad research interests span art practice, institutional history and display practices in the 19th and 20th centuries in Britain and Australia, with particular focus on the art of Western Australia.

Sharon Huebner Ancestral memories absent/performing: ‘No Longer a Wandering Spirit’ The destination of ‘No Longer a Wandering Spirit’ (2016) is relational, socially purposeful and culturally defiant. It’s Indigenous storytelling that rebels with affective and creative force against the often ‘silent’ or ‘closed down’ kinship histories of local descendant communities. It’s Indigenous storytelling that restores to the site of reparative testimony the possibility in the here--‐and--‐now for culturally desired transformative social and political change. In this paper, I retrace the experiences of two Indigenous family groups from Australia -- Wirlomin Minang Noongar families from the Great Southern of Western Australia and Gunai Kurnai Koorie families from eastern Victoria, as they reassemble for the first time within everyday family story the lost memory of their shared ancestor Bessy Flowers (circa 1849 - 1895). The collective performance to coalesce childhood mission memories and adult identity in and of cultural knowledge and worlds of imagination, directs the visceral register of experience and experimentation that is then used for scripting and co--‐producing the digital media project. Narrative analysis of ‘No Longer a Wandering Spirit’ respects the validity of oral and written traditions and the capacity for meaningful intercommunication between local Indigenous knowledge and the colonial archive when defining for a broader audience the contemporary language of cultural identity – that is for the Wirlomin Minang and Gunai Kurnai Families -- Who they are (as Individuals and related kin) and what they might be. BIO: Sharon is a writer, oral historian and digital media producer based at the Monash Indigenous Studies Centre. For over 16 years she has collaborated with Indigenous Australians from Victoria and more recently families from the Northern Territory and Western Australia, focusing on contemporary performances of cultural memory and knowledge production. Sharon’s research explores the contested tensions between oral and written traditions, local knowledge(s) and colonial archives, historical silences and social testimonies. The affective Indigenous uptake of transmedia storytelling is visible in the co--‐production of No Longer a

Wandering Spirit (2016) supported by a State Library Victoria Creative Fellowship (2014) and University of Melbourne Hugh Williamson Fellowship (2015).

Emma Kowal Spencer’s double: The ghostly afterlife of a museum prop

In the mid-1990s, the high point of postmodernism, staff at Museum Victoria planned the new Melbourne Museum. The Indigenous gallery was a major focus at a time when Te Papa and the National Museum of the American Indian were forging new ways of organizing and displaying the Indigenous past. Named Bunjilaka (meaning the place of the ancestral eaglehawk Bunjil), the permanent Indigenous exhibit was a bold expression of community consultation and reflexive museum practice. At the heart of the exhibit, and its most controversial part, was a life size seated sculpture of Baldwin Spencer, anthropologist and co-author of The Native Tribes of Central Australia (1899). Under the curatorship of anthropologist John Morton, Spencer was placed in a glass case with a model of Varanus spenceri, the lizard named for him, at his feet.

When Bunjilaka was redeveloped in 2012 and replaced with a wholly Indigenous-designed and curated exhibit of Aboriginal Victoria, the giant glass case was dismantled and repurposed but the sculpture was retained by museum staff. Initially sitting awkwardly on a trolley in a narrow room where objects were processed for accession, Spencer himself remained unrecorded in any database. With no official existence but considerable gravity, he ended up housed in the secret/sacred room, surrounded with restricted objects that Spencer the man had collected.

This paper will trace the history of the statue from postcolonial pedagogical tool to pseudo-sacred object. I ask: Why was Spencer retained and what might he mean to museum staff? Finally, I consider my own influence on Spencer’s fate as my recent enquiries have inadvertently amplified these questions within the museum.

BIO: Emma Kowal is Professor of Anthropology in the Alfred Deakin Institute at Deakin University and former Deputy Director of the National Centre for Indigenous Genomics at the Australian National University. She is a cultural and historical anthropologist who previously worked as a medical doctor and public health researcher in Indigenous health before completing her PhD in 2007. Her research interests include Indigenous-state relations and settler colonialism, racism and anti-racism, and science and technology studies.

Gavan McCarthy Incursions into Sartrean Space: Archives and the chaos of the human condition Abstract: ‘Sartrean Space’, named cheekily but with respect after J.P. Sartre, I define as the ‘space’ where humans interact with information. The French philosopher’s examination of human existence provides a foundation for understanding not only human creativity (coping) but also the chaos and unpredictability that emerges in human-information interactions. Humans are the masters of synchronic and diachronic variability. We are not machines, we are not robots, our entanglement with our environment means we are constantly adjusting. So how does the notion of the ‘archive’ fit into a world of continuous, simultaneous and

sometimes acute variability? Is the archive simply a place of stability, the datum points of life, the points of reference? How well does the archive refract the chaos and contingency of life? Do we manage archives so that they enable us to map and therefore better understand the diversity of the human condition? This paper will briefly reflect on a select few projects of the eScholarship Research Centre that illustrate these issues and attempt to explain why we need to better understand the dimensions of Sartrean Space. BIO: Gavan McCarthy is Associate Professor of Social and Cultural Informatics at the University of Melbourne. He started in archives in 1978 specialising in records of science and technology and ran the Australian Science Archives Project from 1985. He was appointed Director of the eScholarship Research Centre in 2007. He has been active in the ICA Section on University and Research Institution Archives since 1995 including the Section Bureau from 2012. He has been a member of the ICA Experts Group on Archival Description since 2012 developing the ‘Records in Context’ conceptual model, having worked on second edition of the ISAAR(CPF) standard and the XML schema, Encoded Archival Context (EAC).

Maria Nugent Archives of performance: On tour with the Wild Australia Show Popular performances staged by Aboriginal people in Australia and overseas in the colonial period have garnered increasing historical attention in recent years. Aboriginal stageshows and other exhibition events were held in a wide variety of locations and sites, in front of diverse audiences, and with manifold effects. Acknowledging the complexities of performance, interpretations of Aboriginal performance and performers have moved away from questions of coercion and exploitation to consider the ways in which performance provided scope for a politics that was pursued and enacted through bodily, expressive and aesthetic forms. In The Archive and the Repertoire, performance theorist Diana Taylor argues that performances are “vital acts of transfer, transmitting social knowledge, memory and a sense of identity”. Archives -- both in the sense of historical records or artefacts and the repositories that hold them -- can be understood as serving similar functions. But, as Taylor shows, archiving performance is notoriously difficult, precisely because the power of performance is ephemeral, dependent on a moment of encounter and interaction that is not easily captured or rendered in representational forms. While performances can be repeated, they are, in a sense, non-reproducible. In this paper, I focus on the written, photographic and artifactual archives (or archives-in-the-making) of the Wild Australia Show, a troupe of about 30 Queensland Aboriginal people, which toured Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne between late 1892 and mid-1893, in order to discuss some of the challenges of writing cross-cultural histories of performance and its political effects. BIO: Maria Nugent is a research fellow in the School of History at ANU. She is currently working on an ARC Linkage Project with colleagues at the University of Queensland and a number of state museums and libraries examining the history and legacies of the Wild Australia Show, a troupe of Aboriginal performers from Queensland that toured in the early 1890s. She recently edited (with Sarah Carter) Mistress of Everything: Queen Victoria in Indigenous Worlds (Manchester University Press, 2016).

Amanda Lourie Reading along the Grain of the 1841 Queries Respecting the Human Race to reveal Aboriginal knowledge and colonial pushback to British ethnological ideas within 1850s-1860s colonial Victoria. In this paper I describe my research, using Ann Laura Stoler’s approach of reading along the grain, into the use of the British Association for the Advancement of Science’s 1841 Queries Respecting the Human Race within 1850s and 1860s colonial Victoria. Such an approach to a document linked to humanitarian, political and scientific bodies within the colony allowed consideration of the construction, context, language, purpose and readership of the resulting colonial documents and provided an opportunity to study colonial archives as products of ‘countermand’ as well as command.1 Whereas Stoler considered those working in the Netherlands Indies colonial government and the resultant Dutch colonial archives in her work, this paper analyses the ‘countermands’ to British (and French) ethnological ideas entering the colony. In so doing it reveals pushback to the hierarchies, means of classification and understanding of Indigenous people contained within some responses to the Queries because of the engagement with and understanding of Aboriginal people and Aboriginal knowledge by some settlers. This in turn revealed Indigenous strategy in sharing (or retaining as private) information with settlers, as well as complex relationships between Aboriginal people and settlers in the aftermath of the frontier years and during a period of government lasseiz faire policy regarding Aboriginal people.

BIO: Amanda Lourie is a research historian at Native Title Services Victoria. She recently was granted her PhD, titled From Paddock to Page: Ethnological engagements in 1850s-1860s colonial Victoria, completed under the supervision of Helen Gardner and Tiffany Shellam at Deakin University.

Alistair Paterson and Andrea Witcomb Collections without end: the ghostly presences of Captain Matthew McVicker-Smyth and his Western Australian Mineral collection That collections can often end without trace is not that unusual. Collectors die without anyone willing to take on their collection and care for it or they end up dispersed, sold through auction houses or distributed throughout countless institutions. More often than not, we don’t even know that they once existed. In this paper, we explore what responsibilities the present might have to one such event out of our own chance encounter in the archive, which revealed the traces of a collection once on public display but privately owned – that of Captain Matthew McVicker-Smyth and his Western Australian Mineral collection. As far as we have been able to establish, the collection itself no longer exists. Four photographs in the State Library of Western Australia and a few newspaper articles are all we have left with which to reconstruct both the nature and the history of this collection. The picture we are able to build with these meagre materials however, revealed a collection whose making reflected the nature of the colonial encounter in Western Australia, prompting a range of ethical questions as to how to manage these traces. The paper will provide an account of this collection’s history as we know it so far, an analysis of its display and the

1 Stoler, Archival Grain, pp. 46, 48. Ann Laura Stoler, ‘In Cold Blood’: Hierarchies of Credibility and the Politics of Colonial Narratives’, in Ricardo Roque & Kim A. Wagner, Engaging Colonial Knowledge: Reading European Archives in World History, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, 2011, pp. 35-66, pp. 37, 62-63.

beginnings of an attempt to locate the provenance of its contents, in the hope of being able at some point in the future, to make some kind of restitution for the wrongs of the past. BIOS: Professor Alistair Paterson is an ARC Future Fellow in archaeology at the University of Western Australia. His research examines the historical archaeology of colonial coastal contact and settlement in Australia’s Northwest and the Indian Ocean. His key interests are Western Australia and Indian Ocean history, Aboriginal Australia, Dutch East India Company, colonialism and exploration, rock art, and the history of collecting in Western Australia in collaboration with the Western Australian Museum, State Library, Art Gallery, and the British Museum. He is the author of A Millennium of Cultural Contact (Left Coast, 2011), The Lost Legions: Culture Contact in Colonial Australia (Alta Mira, 2008) and editor with Jane Balme of Archaeology in Practice: A Student Guide to Archaeological Analyses (2nd edition, Blackwell Publishing, 2013). Andrea Witcomb is a Professor in cultural heritage and museum studies at Deakin University where she is the Deputy Director (Governance) of the Alfred Deakin Institute for Citizenship and Globalisation. She has a long-standing interest in the ways in which exhibition practices can be used to create conversations across cultural differences as well as in the interpretation of difficult histories in museums and heritage sites. As well as co-leading, with Prof. Alistair Patterson the Collecting the West: Reimagining Western Australia from its collection, Andrea also led an ARC Discovery project looking at the Collection of Cultural Diversity in Australia’s Collecting sector. She is the author of Reimagining the Museum: Beyond the Mausoleum (Routledge 2003), From the Barracks to the Burrup: The National Trust in Western Australia with Kate Gregory (UNSW Press 2010), co-editor with Chris Healy of South Pacific Museums: Experiments in Culture (Monash epress 2006; 2012) and, with Kylie Message, of Museum Theory (Wiley Blackwell 2015).

Richard Pennell How do the processes of digitisation change the nature of an archive and what are the implications of that for historians This paper is about the archived material that was always a digital record, rather than hard-copy archives that were subsequently digitised. It will take two cases. One is the online records of refugee appeal tribunals in New Zealand, Australia and Britain (particularly referring to the Middle East and North Africa). The other is the record of social media exchanges during a crisis, in this case the day when Mu`ammar al-Qaddafi was killed in Libya in October 2011. These are aggregated on the Libya Uprising Archive website (http://www.libyauprisingarchive.com). The differences between official records and less formal collections are well-know, but here there is another consideration: the question of form. Although the asylum records have never been released or circulated as hard-copy documents, they maintain that form. Is the electronic format simply a question of ease of distribution and does that explain the difficulties that an outside researcher has in using them? The social media conversations were never intended either to take a documentary form or to form a conscious record. They have become both, because outsiders brought them together. What is the role of the assembler of digital records on their content, how does the origin of the assembler of the documents (N African or western) affect how they

were collected, and should historians use them in different ways from written historical records? BIO: Associate Professor Pennell is al-Tajir Lecturer in the History of Islam and the Middle

East, University of Melbourne, Australia. He has published extensively on the history of North

Africa and the Middle East, including Morocco since 1830 (London & New York: C.Hurst and

New York University Press 2000. He is currently researching the history of asylum seekers

accounts of oppression from the Middle East and North Africa.

I am not a member of an Australian State Oral History Association

Tiffany Shellam Co-productions grounded in place For all its shortcomings, asymmetry in representation and Eurocentric perceptions and structures, as an ethnographic historian I constantly find myself gravitating towards the challenges and tensions that the colonial archive embodies and contains. As Ricardo Roque and Kim Wagner have noted, no matter how critical historians are of the archive, they remain ‘firm believers in, and (re)producers of, the factuality of colonial knowledge’, relying on it as a ‘bounded fieldwork site and a source for historical narration’. In focusing on the contexts of archival production (from representation to institutionalisation) and to the encounters during which accounts were produced, the archive might yet be considered ‘a productive condition of possibility’, rather than a ‘harmful obstacle to historical understanding’. This paper explores this idea by focusing on several documents relating to Noongar Country (south-west WA) which might be best considered co-productions between Indigenous people and colonisers in the early 19thC. Gyalliput’s encampment (1833), George Fletcher Moore’s maps of his search for an inland sea (1836) and Noongar accounts of exploration have not always been read with depth or complexity by historians. One reason for this is the double blindness they represent, viewed as either inauthentic because of the imperial discourse in which they are framed in the archive, or conversely, heavily coded within an impenetrable indigenous knowledge structure. Such a dismissal risks flattening Noongar geographic and social knowledge of Country. By attending to the contexts of their production and the ways in which they have been categorised and archived, we might value such sources as negotiated tellings. BIO Dr Tiffany Shellam is Senior Lecturer in History at Deakin University. She publishes on the history of encounters between Aboriginal people and Europeans in the contexts of exploration, early settlement and mission stations in the nineteenth century. She is currently working on the ARC Discovery Project Ancestors Words: Noongar writing in Government Archives, 1860-1960 and the ARC Linkage Project Collecting the West: How Collections Create Western Australia. With Maria Nugent and Shino Konishi she recently co-edited the books Indigenous Intermediaries: New Perspectives on Exploration Archives (ANU epress 2015) and Brokers and Boundaries: Colonial Exploration in Indigenous Territory, (ANU epress, 2016). Bronwyn Shepherd Exploring the early constructions of space on Milingimbi Mission.

In much historical and anthropological scholarship the spaces created by ‘missions’ in Australian Aboriginal history remain undervalued as dynamic sites with multiple histories. Instead mission places tend to be represented as homogenised and bounded entities. Thus reducing the dynamics of the lived experience to fit the overarching agendas represented and contained along the archival trail, whether that of the missionary society or that of the anthropologist. Missions, however were complex spaces of belonging, where sustained and intimate cross-cultural contact provided valuable material for exploring multiple trajectories.

My research presents an historical anthropological analysis, with a particular focus on the interactions which occurred on Milingimbi Methodist Mission, situated in Northeast Arnhem Land during the early 20th century. Over the past century, people of Milingimbi have been represented by missionaries, anthropologists and others, hence constituting copious collections of archival trails from this area. These continue to be housed in and accessed by their respective institutions. Alongside these are the many images providing visual elements to these representations. Close attention across such trails I argue will provide access into nuances relating to temporality and inter-subjectivities, discursive processes and material practices. Although Milingimbi gradually ceased to function as a mission by the 1970s many people continue to live in the same spaces originally designated by the mission and hence are daily impacted by its representations. This project seeks to bring together these multi-dimensions of representations alongside the breadth of lived experiences, to broaden the context from which the past can be viewed and accessed by those who continue to live in these spaces in the present. BIO: Bronwyn Shepherd is currently working on her PhD at Deakin University under the supervision of Prof Emma Kowal and Dr Joanna Cruickshank. Her research draws from an historical anthropological perspective to explore intercultural spaces during the early years of Milingimbi Methodist Mission, during the interwar years. Elfie Shiosaki Archives and human rights: Histories of discursive advocacy by Noongar people for Indigenous rights Archives in Western Australia holds many letters written by Noongar people to the State. Some of these letters trace histories of discursive advocacy by Noongar people for Indigenous human rights. This advocacy emerged in a political context in which Indigenous rights were systematically violated under the 1905 Aborigines Act and the administration of the Chief Protector of Aborigines, A O Neville, from 1915 to 1940. These traces of discursive advocacy contribute to transnational narratives of Indigenous political autonomy. They reveal how Noongar people dynamically engaged with an international circulation of ideas and movements and contributed to new discourses of rights from around the mid-nineteenth century. BIO: Dr Elfie Shiosaki is an Indigenous Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at the Centre for Human Rights Education (CHRE) at Curtin University in Perth, Western Australia. She completed a PhD (International Relations) on nation-building in post-conflict societies in 2015.

Nick Thieberger The new reformation: digitisation and ubiquity of cultural material as restitution of cultural property When an analog recording is unique it can become an object of veneration, requiring what could be considered a pilgrimage to its home before it can be consulted. The digital, on the other hand, offers to desanctify this relic, it is a reformation of data access. Like all reformations it encounters resistance from those who would otherwise benefit from the pilgrimage, or whose reputations are based on their privileged access to the oracle of the data. Rather than mourning the loss of the anlaog, we celebrate the renewed life of otherwise inaccessible recordings provided by the digital version, access with an immediacy that was never previously possible. Thus the digitisation and provision of access can be seen as a liberation of the records and, when the records are of small and marginalised communities speaking minority languages, is an act of social justice, inscribing something of the minority culture into the internet and providing access to the families of those recorded by the outsider researcher. Our project, the Pacific and Regional Archive for Digital Sources in Endangered Cultures (PARADISEC), has been finding and digitising analog recordings typically made by academic researchers since the 1950s. The colonial legacy in linguistics is reflected in the extraction of records that were not then made available to the source community. Most commonly, the recordings of performance in a small language ended up in the linguist’s office or in their estate when they died. Taking responsibility for making these records available has required the following steps which will be discussed in this presentation:

- locating the tapes - negotiating a licence for their digitisation and access conditions - building the standards-based infrastructure to describe and curate the digital records - publicising the collection via an API for discovery - building relationships with Museums and Cultural Centres in the Pacific

BIO: Nick Thieberger established the Pilbara Aboriginal Language Centre in Port Hedland in the late 1980s. He worked at the Vanuatu Cultural Centre and went on to write a grammar of Nafsan, a language from central Vanuatu, which was a pioneering work in creating a citable media corpus on which the analysis was based. In 2003 he helped establish the Pacific and Regional Archive for Digital Sources in Endangered Cultures (http://paradisec.org.au), and is now its Director. He is an Australian Research Council Future Fellow in the School of Languages and Linguistics at the University of Melbourne, Australia anda CI in the Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language. Ann Vickery Reparative Housework and Reconceptualising an Archival Home in the Poetry of Natalie Harkin This paper considers the poetry of Natalie Harkin as part of a wave of twenty-first century Aboriginal literature that focuses on a nexus of sovereignty, resilience and repair. Building upon the groundwork of Oodgeroo Noonuccal and Lionel Fogarty, such poetry combines personal and public histories in critiquing narratives of colonialism that have been circulated as ‘truths.’ While Harkin is similar to fellow poet Tony Birch in writing back to the colonial archive, I argue that she reconceptualises the archive through maternal legacies and a troubling of the trope of domiciliation. In doing so, she undertakes a reparative revisioning of

the archive that shifts between the official archive as house and an alternative archive of the poem as home to cultural memories. This paper will also consider how Harkin’s poetry takes part in a larger context of First Nations and feminist art practices. I argue that poetic practice may transformatively work with what Sianne Ngai calls ‘ugly feelings’ to draw out positive affects in an archive of feeling that stresses hope. BIO: Ann Vickery is Senior Lecturer in Writing and Literature at Deakin University. She is the author of Leaving Lines of Gender: A Feminist Genealogy of Language Writing (2000), Stressing the Modern: Cultural Politics in Australian Women’s Poetry (2007), The Complete Pocketbook of Swoon (2014), and Devious Intimacy (2015). She co-authored The Intimate Archive: Journeys through Private Papers (2009) with Maryanne Dever and Sally Newman, co-edited Manifesting Australian Literary Feminisms: Nexus and Faultlines (2009) with Margaret Henderson, and co-edited Poetry and the Trace (2013) with John Hawke. She has also co-edited a special issue of Southerly on contemporary postcolonial and diasporic poetries in Australia with Ali Alizadeh (2013) and a special issue of Affirmations: Of the Modern on modernism, intimacy and emotion with Lorraine Sim (2014).

Kirsten Wright The stories we tell ourselves: power, harm and complicity in the archive This paper discusses the power imbalances inherent in archives by considering the role archival principles have in maintaining unequal power relations; and how the narratives around the use of archives for liberatory and social justice purposes serve to obfuscate the complicity of archivists in perpetuating these power imbalances. Using examples from the Find & Connect web resource and predecessor projects, it will consider issues of professional boundaries and gatekeeping, as well as the knowledge required to access archives, particularly when the people requesting access are also the subjects of the records. It will invite the audience to consider how we as archivists currently use, describe and interrogate the archival principles we rely on, such as original order and provenance, and discuss how uncritical adherence to these archival principles can perpetuate further alienation and trauma of marginalised groups. Powerful narratives have been constructed that ideate the archivist as activist, working towards a better future. However, these narratives remain uninterrogated, allowing them to be repeated without any depth of consideration. This paper challenges those notions of the implicit greater good of archives, and proposes that the first action of the archivist/activist must be to consider our own role in perpetuating the harm caused by unchallenged and unchecked power. BIO: Kirsten Wright is the Program Manager, Find & Connect web resource, eScholarship Research Centre, University of Melbourne. Previously, she was the Manager, Records & Archives Services at Victoria University, and has also worked at the Public Record Office Victoria. Kirsten holds a BA in history and politics, and a Masters of Information Management and Systems, both from Monash University. She tweets as @ktaines. Diana Young The Colours of Sheep: Early ‘wool work’ as cultural production and as mission production among the Ernabella craft women in the Australian Western Desert 1940- 1980.

Based on archival research and fieldwork this paper discusses the ‘wool work’ on which the Ernabella craft room was founded in 1949. Created by the Presbyterian Mission to give employment to women and young girls, many of whom had recently walked in from the North Western Aboriginal reserve, the craft room has endured to the present day as Ernabella Arts Inc. It now forms part of the Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjarta Lands. Built on the availability of wool from the sheep station of the Ernabella mission, this early, thirty year long, phase of the craft room has now almost disappeared from view in contemporary artists CVs. Or it is presented as an early but unrelated phase of the current contemporary sophistication of painted cultural products. Using an adaptation of their own indigenous spinning, wool was also dyed, woven and knotted into floor rugs. In this paper I will discuss the importance of the early reportage of wool work in building the mission narrative whilst also re shaping gender roles during the initial period of colonial contact, and how these aspects have continued impact today. BIO: Dr Diana Young is a social anthropologist who researches and publishes on visual, material and digital culture and incorporates archives and museum collections in her research. Her research interests include colour, research through curation, contemporary Australian and Pacific cultural production and their histories, and public anthropology and the re-invention of ‘ethnographic’ museums for the 21st century. She has curated, directed, and collaborated on, 17 exhibitions. She was the Director of the UQ Anthropology Museum for eight years, transforming it into a public institution.

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