The Archives

Historical Studies
Voices from the West End
06.02.12 | Permalink | Comment?

On a triangle of land that points out to sea at the mouth of the Swan River is Fremantle’s heritage district, the West End, renowned for its colonial architecture that includes the largest collection of heritage-listed buildings in Western Australia and its oldest public building, the Round House gaol (1831). Although Fremantle has often been threatened by the demands of redevelopment, today it is recognised as one of the world’s best preserved examples of a nineteenth-century port city and colonial townscape. ‘Freo’, as it is known locally, also has an exceptionally diverse multicultural community, lending a special character that is the legacy of its role as a historical gateway to Australia, the first point of contact for generations of migrants and visitors arriving by sea from Europe. This mix of cultures and traditions has shaped the life of the cosmopolitan city, which now has a population of close to 30,000.
Cultural Studies, Historical Studies, Life Writing
Lives Recovered and Reclaimed
25.04.11 | Permalink | Comment?

A life can be recovered in many ways: through retrieving, reclaiming, remembering, re-imagining, revising, restoring, recognising, re-telling or re-placing. In this special issue of Life Writing the impulse to pay respect to lost, hidden or unacknowledged lives flows through the papers, all of which are drawn from the major international conference on ‘Recovering Lives’ convened by Cassandra Pybus, Caroline Turner and Paul Arthur in 2008, and hosted by the Humanities Research Centre at the Australian National University. With sessions held at the National Museum of Australia, accompanying exhibitions, artists’ talks and film screenings, the conference aimed to break down traditional barriers between disciplines, media and ways of seeing. Historians, writers, filmmakers, anthropologists, curators, journalists, artists and activists interpreted the theme in ways that put the spotlight on people and practices that the global vision, for all its benefits, has left behind, overlooked, marginalised, or even enslaved.
Historical Studies, Life Writing, Literary Studies
Unearthing the Past
20.04.11 | Permalink | Comment?

When Hitler’s troops invaded and occupied the city of Kharkov in Ukraine, my grandparents Nadia, 26, and Petro, 30, had two young children, aged 7 and 5. My mother had not yet been born. In this tense and uncertain period it was unclear whether Ukraine would ultimately be controlled by Stalin or Hitler. There was nothing to recommend one over the other, they often said. Both regimes were brutal and both targeted Ukrainians. Mid-1943 marked a turning point—the end of their lives in Ukraine and the first stage of a journey into the unknown that led to their eventual arrival in Australia in 1949 as post-war refugees. They were packed into railway goods wagons with other Ukrainians and were taken from Kharkov, where they had built their world, to Dwikozy in Poland. This was the place of their first displacement from everything that made up their history and identity—homeland, language, culture, family, community, and career. Like many other refugees my grandparents attempted to compensate for the loss of their past by trying to recover it repeatedly years later in the stories that they told.
Cultural Studies, Historical Studies, Life Writing
Trauma Online
25.03.09 | Permalink | Comment?

This article considers how traditional physical memorials to war and other catastrophic events differ from online memorials in the Web 2.0 environment and it asks what the benefits and drawbacks of each may be. There has always been an awkward fit between the public statements embodied in monuments to those who died in war and the personal stories told by individuals who returned. This disjuncture serves to demonstrate that the two ways of remembering traumatic events—the collective and the individual—have traditionally been poles apart and often contradictory. Gradually, over the past two decades, with the increasing influence of critical theories that have questioned national and other dominating discourses—and also with growing interest within the field of clinical psychology in what is now labeled post-traumatic stress disorder—there has been an increasing interest in the vast underlayer of personal stories that national narratives have shut out or silenced.
Communication and Media Studies, Historical Studies, Life Writing
Pixelated Memory
25.05.08 | Permalink | Comment?

War memorials are the most familiar and visible means of acknowledging and respecting the trauma of large scale, violent conflict. In practically every town in Australia, however small, monuments to war are found. These are haunting, poignant reminders of the brutality of war and the fragility of life. And yet, their reassuring solidity and prominence shields us from the reality of lost lives and suffering by casting war in terms of abstract and stylised notions of heroism, loyalty, sacrifice and glory. While it is usual for the names of the dead to be listed on these monuments, their individual suffering is blended, ritualised and distanced in a symbolic and generalised tribute. It is not surprising then that there has always been an awkward fit between the public statements made by these monuments and the personal stories told by individuals who returned.