Archives Tragic

I’ve been on hols and came back to 2,700+ un-moderated comments (spam) on Archives Tragic. There were so many that they jammed things up and I could not deal with them in the normal way. In my efforts to delete them, it looks like I accidentally deleted some recent approved comments from Helen and Tim, and maybe others. I might also have deleted some non-spam comments from new contributors. Sorry guys.

This is one of the reasons that I’m closing Archives Tragic. If I ever do another blog I will certainly go for better spam filtering.

Anne-Marie

‘Lizzie’s stuff’ is Archives Tragic’s Last (substantial) Post. Although I am not taking the site down, I will not be writing any more posts. I will leave the posts open for comment for a while, and then switch the comments function off. (A time-consuming and dispiriting aspect of running a blog is dealing with ghastly spam.)

I think AT has run its natural course, although I’m not saying that there won’t be an Archives Tragic 2 one day. (’Return to Archives Tragic’? ‘Archives Tragic Strikes Back’? ‘Archives Tragic goes to Kirrin Island’? Suggestions welcome.) For the moment I would like to put more time into some bigger projects, including a couple of journal articles which demand to be written.

AT has been enormously satisfying and good fun and my thanks go to all readers and commentors - Tim Roberts and Christina Spittel especially - who have loyally supported the blog and kept it going since it began in April 2007.

December is my least favourite time of the year (’another year gone … ‘) but happy Christmas to all, and best wishes for 2009.

Anne-Marie

Princess of the world

The day before her sixth birthday party, I asked my daughter Lizzie to help me clean out her room, which was a mess. On the big day she would want to show her friends her room, wouldn’t she? And she would need space for all her presents. Encouraged by that thought, she agreed. The room was full of drawings, bits of writing, colourings-in, dot-to-dots, cut-outs, paper chains, paper planes, cardboard cars, cardboard spaceships, and so on. Lizzie loves paper. Continue Reading »

I have not yet been able to do more than pick up and flick through a copy of Brian Matthews’s biography of Manning Clark. In my brief look it was actually a bit hard to get past one of the opening epigraph, a quote from Anthony Beevor:

I find official records can be full of rubbish and official lies while a diary is more historically valid. It is contemporary and written in a real voice with no reason to lie.

Really? A diary has no reason to lie? Continue Reading »

Helen Garner’s essay collection The feel of steel has been republished by Picador this year and it brings forth again her lovely piece “Woman in a green mantle”. Garner’s work holds appeal for archives trgaics in something like the way that Janet Malcolm’s does. Wide and acute observation is bound to bring out, somewhere along the line, insights about the records and record-creation parts of our lives.

“Woman in a green mantle” offers a lot to think about. This is where Garner quotes Philip Larkin, that “the urge to preserve is the basis of all art”. It is also where she describes her life-long diary and note-keeping habits, and the shelves of “battered old notebooks stuffed with inconsequential factoids” that have accumulated as a result. She never opens the notebooks once they are finished, but can’t bring herself to destroy them either.

The bit that leaped out to make me smile is this. Garner quotes one of Cormac McCarthy’s “enviably inarticulate modern cowboys” saying somwhere: “You write everythin down, pretty soon you don’t remember nothin.”

Compare that to master-archivist Hilary Jenkinson, who says that archives begin with “the preservation of pieces of writing as a convenient form of artificial memory.”

The cowboy has arrived at a similar insight as the besuited archivist, although there is a hint from the cowboy that he thinks that writing, ultimately, empties your head.

There could be something in that. Better write it down.

At Borders last week I fell into purchasing a copy of Jack Kerouac’s On the road. I was in one of those “I want to buy a book and I don’t much care what it is” kind of moods. Borders is good at taking advantage of people in that vulnerable state. On the road was on a temptation table at the front of the store and was going cheap. Kerouac’s book is a bit outside my normal reading but, I told myself happily, were it not for impulse purchases like these one might never try anything new. And it was from the introduction to the book that I discovered something else new to me: the story of the Kerouac having typed the novel in a three-week burst in 1951 on to one continuous scroll of paper. Continue Reading »

Squeezing the [historical?] juice

A front page headline from a recent edition of the The Australian: “Historians ‘neglecting role as storytellers ‘”.

This was the start to my day last Monday week, while I was on a field trip in central New South Wales. Historian Peter Cochrane was scheduled to give an address to the Brisbane conference of the History Teachers Association of Australia. The Australian had got out its bellows and was using Cochrane’s address to pump oxygen into the history vs fiction debate. Well, it’s good to see a story about historical practice making the front page of our national newspaper. I guess. Continue Reading »

She’ll never take me alive

Archives Tragic is gone chasing Ben Hall in central western New South Wales. Back in a couple of weeks.

Official records at the Australian War Memorial, 1945

Computers were blessedly unknown and catalogues not really necessary … Catalogues are all very well as a means of ordering up from forbidden regions books a reader needs for his research, but quite useless to a reader who has no means of guessing whether a book is relevant until he has looked inside its cover.
Russell Ward

[B]ut soon they set me up at a desk … and gave me the run of the place. No forms in triplicate, no searching indexes first: I could work quickly and look where I liked.
Bill Gammage

Russell Ward is writing of the National Library of Australia as he remembered it in 1953 when he worked there on The Australian legend. Bill Gammage was recalling the library at the Australian War Memorial in the mid-to late 1960s, when he undertook research for his book The broken years. Continue Reading »

Perfect book, perfect package …

My lounge-room is done out mostly in quiet and muted colours. I didn’t plan it that way, for I am no interior decorator, it just happened. Boldness of colour is provided by a bookshelf loaded mainly with old Penguin paperback novels: black spines for the Classics, orange for the rest. Penguin-orange. My eyes seek it out automatically in any second-hand bookshop or market. Most loved are the earliest editions, those with the two bands of orange top and bottom, cream in the middle. At the bottom is the famous figure of the penguin, “dignified but flippant”, drawn from life (in its original form) at the London zoo. Continue Reading »