Archives Tragic

In bed the other night I read Janet Malcolm’s latest book, Two lives, which is about Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas. A mention of Stein’s literary manuscripts leads Malcolm to note that it is at the Beinecke Library at Yale that most of Stein’s manuscripts “repose”.

Repose? Repose? I was reposing. One of my cats (the placid one, not the one suffering from ADHD) was reposing next to me. But do manuscripts - or any records - “repose” in the archives? Continue Reading »

On Friday evenings I often watch the ABC’s state-based current affairs program Stateline, at 7.30. Lazing in front of the telly after a take-away dinner from the local shops, I am in the mood for something easy and chatty, and the Canberra version of Stateline is endearingly local. It reminds me of TV produced in Hobart in the 1970s by the ABC: Peter Cundall’s gardening program “Landscape” (this was before the program went national) and Judy Tierney’s “To market, to market”. Once a week Judy would do the rounds of the supermarkets to pick up a selection of fruit and veg. She would bring the groceries back to the studio and deliver 10 minutes of advice to camera on the best buys in apples and tomatoes and so forth. It was all about community and people liked it. Continue Reading »

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“To Mum and Dad, I love school. We have been learning about letter writing. Love from Lizzie.”

I received this letter through the post some time ago, in May, from my daughter Lizzie. She is five. She wrote it in class as part of a “writers’ festival” undertaken last term at her primary school in Canberra. Letter-writing was the theme of the festival which ran in all classes from Kindergarten to Year 6. Pleasingly, activities centred around formal letter writing. Continue Reading »

Can three be a collection? Last weekend at the Gorman House markets in Canberra I came across a copy of 1066 and all that and when I got it home I realised that I already had two spin-offs from W.C. Sellar and R.J. Yeatman’s famous spoof on English history, first published in 1930. I pulled off my shelves Robert Manson Myers’ From Beowulf to Virginia Woolf: an astounding and wholly unauthorised history of English literature (1954) and Richard Armor’s The classics reclassified (1961). Both were picked up cheap in op. shops. I think I’m on a roll. Continue Reading »

I’m still reading Michael Ignatieff’s biography of philosopher and historian Isaiah Berlin, pushed along by a number of interests, one of which is Ignatieff’s first chapter. In that he describes the setting - Berlin’s rooms in London - in which many of his meetings with Berlin took place. These interviews occurred over a ten year period from 1988 until 1997 and became the main source for the biography: more significant than written sources, important though those were. What pleases me in particular is the way that sound, and especially the manner of Berlin’s speech, figures so prominently in the life of Berlin that Ignatieff constructs. Continue Reading »

At home recovering from ‘flu I’ve had a bit of a chance to read properly, and through my headache this morning was enjoying Michael Ignatieff’s biography of Isaiah Berlin (bought for $3 in an op. shop in Gungahlin - who would have believed it?). Writing to Elizabeth Bowen in 1933, Berlin quoted Emmanuel Kant: “Out if the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made.”

From this thought developed Berlin’s own proposition that different values, or different ideas about how to live, may be incompatible but can be equally valid. Moral conflicts are therefore “an intrinsic, irremovable element in human life”.

Late in his life Berlin published a book of essays using Kant’s words for the title: The crooked timber of humanity: chapters in the history of ideas (John Murray, 1990). The “crooked timber” idea has also cascaded into a now-famous blog covering political and philosophical topics.

We could shift the quote into an archives context: “Out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight record was ever made.” People and organisations will always find ways of making records in ways to suit themselves, and will always adapt or contravene accepted or imposed recordkeeping regimes. Because people are just people. This gets us no further to explain why people create, keep and dispose of records in the myriad ways they do. But still, I like it.

For people serving in the Australian armed forces, the Victoria Cross is the highest bravery award. Not surprisingly, the award is made only rarely. Procedures for recommending the VC require careful recordkeeping: that also should not be surprising. And yet media stories in the week just gone seem to imply that the case of John Simpson Kirkpatrick should be different and that even now, more than 90 years on, a posthumous VC should be awarded him.

The usual requirement that a VC recommendation be supported by independent eyewitness statements has been dismissed by one writer as the “ultimate nitpicking”. Simpson would have got the VC, so the argument goes, except that the paperwork let him down. Nonsense, argue others. If his superiors had wanted to recommend him for a VC they would have, but they didn’t. It is an interesting issue to follow because obscured behind moral indignation on both sides is a debate about the significance of recordkeeping standards. Continue Reading »

What a marvellous thing is this:

This column was erected by SIMMIE & Co
Builders
Canberra

GOD SAVE KING GEORGE V

Continue Reading »

Lots of blogs make it to their first birthday, but a lot don’t. Archives Tragic first appeared on 22 April 2007 with “The ‘dusty archives’ hall of shame”. (I’m posting this birthday card a little ahead of the day because I’m preparing to go overseas later this week.)

Since then AT has ranged over the significance and relationships between records, archives, collections, memory and history in every-day experience. Along the way we have had some good debates and, hopefully, set each other thinking. Hopefully too we have shown that there is a place for informal, reflective, essay-style writing on archives and history. At least in the Australian archives scene there is no forum which invites personal essays reflecting on records and archives. Outside Archives Tragic, the form barely exists. A pity.

Sadly too, academic historians must still yoke themselves to the book and to the refereed journal article in order to advance their careers. Perhaps as a result, many are wary of blogs and websites as ways of exploring and communicating historical ideas. This is shared even by some public historians who, you would think, would know better. This at least has been my observation; I hope I’m wrong.

Anyway, thanks to all AT’s faithful readers and contributors, especially those whose comments have kept the blog going through difficult times.

Anne-Marie

The Monthly for this month brings a terrific feature article by David Marr discussing the papers of novelist Patrick White that were deposited with the National Library of Australia in late-2006. Until then few people knew about the existence of these papers; White claimed not to keep many papers and discouraged his friends from keeping his letters. Even Marr, White’s acclaimed biographer, seems to have been taken aback. He waited until the media “hoopla” surrounding the deposit had died down before making his way to the NLA to see the papers for himself. Continue Reading »