EARLIER THIS YEAR, I endured the miserably ubiquitous experience of trying to install a software update on my phone and discovering that I didn’t have enough space. I lost an hour or so trawling through the clutter of my camera roll to free up some memory. As it turned out, about 60 per cent of my photo library was screenshots of things I’d never looked at again (memes, outfits, Instagram ads); the other 40 per cent was cats (mostly just one cat, to be honest). I filled the trash folder with dispiriting ease. If someone who’d never met me had to piece together a sense of my existence from these snapshots alone, they’d have to do some intense editorialising.

Perhaps that’s not such a bad thing; or perhaps the feline-forward content conveyed top notes of Grey Gardens (1975). Either way, the experience made me think of my parents’ family albums, lovingly curated and labelled by year and location – nothing like the overstuffed and undermaintained bottom drawer of my smartphone. There were two albums in particular that I’d return to again and again as a kid: one for my dad and one for my mum, each volume featuring chronologically arranged images of them as babies, children, teens, twentysomethings. When I first came across these albums at age eight or nine, I was – in the grand tradition of children everywhere – astounded to discover that my parents had been people before I existed.

Like any archive, those albums were full of omissions, some deliberate and some accidental; unlike my camera roll, they’d been expressly editorialised, assembled with intent and care. This is both the temptation and the trick of archival creation and discovery: how we navigate the border between truth and myth, fact and fable, elucidation and erasure.

THIS EDITION OF Griffith Review ventures deep into the stacks to unearth new stories and retell old ones. The essays in this collection traverse the globe, travelling through Sudan, Hungary, Poland, Palestine, South Africa, France and more to reconstruct national and familial histories; closer to home, they reveal the ways in which Blak archivalism treats the archive as a verb rather than a noun; they illuminate the lives of women time forgot and of women who wove their own deliberate narratives; they delve beneath the Earth’s layers of sand and stone to contemplate the mysteries of deep time; and they look in two directions, forward and back, to ask how the futures we once imagined for ourselves may diverge from those we have yet to create. This edition’s rich fiction and poetry offerings subvert our sense of reality, reframe our understanding of how to tell a story and present new perspectives on the nature of being.

The contributing editor for Griffith Review 93 was the brilliant Nathan mudyi Sentance, a Wiradjuri librarian and museum educator. He commissioned and worked with curator and writer Coby Edgar, whose lively and insightful essay, ‘Archival notes’, explores institutional and personal archival experiences with nuance and wit. We’re so grateful to Nathan and Coby for their wonderful contribution. This edition also features the last of our remarkable 2025 Emerging Voices competition winners: ‘The mangroves of Boykambil’ by James Aird.

Into the Archive is, of course, an archive in its own right – one full of secrets and surprises that will, I hope, delight you as a reader for years to come.

THREE MONTHS AFTER cleaning up my camera roll, I’ve got a new phone with a much bigger memory, which means, naturally, that my landfill of cat pics and screenshots is thriving once more, spreading out in my device like the digital equivalent of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. But it’s my garbage patch, memes and all; no doubt my lack of curation tells its own kind of archival story.

– June 2026