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Nanu Gaamu / Google said
WRITING GIVES ME the power to transform the colonial settler narrative written for me (the racialised assumption and notion that ‘natives are unlovable and uncaring’). Writing reminds me why I shouldn’t fear my language too, in spite of the old colonial notion that ‘Islanders’ speaking their language are criminals or evil. Every Thursday at 7 pm, I sit at the dinner table with my cultural parents, ready to hear and analyse the sound theory of Kala Lagaw Ya.
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EARLIER THIS YEAR, I endured the miserably ubiquitous experience of trying to install a software update on my phone...
The museum of the future
The Museum of the Future is not a futuristic museum – a museum as it might look in, say, the twenty-second century. It is a museum devoted to the idea of the future: to the future’s past, in other words. Its exhibits are evidence of a remarkable, and peculiarly human, ability: to speculate on what tomorrow might bring.
(re)Verbing the archive
When I think about the archive, my mind wanders to trees and birds and seeds and springs and grandmothers long before it gets to brick and mortar. All things hold and carry on memory and knowledge – an inheritance for the younger generations.
Portrait of the artist as an archive
I began to hate JM Coetzee during the month I spent in his archives. It was January 2015 and the archives were still relatively recently opened, acquired in 2012 by the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin. Other scholars who had visited were abuzz with enthusiasm.
Rising tides and archival inundation
In January 2022, in the receding wake of a record king tide, the buried remains of a Kaurareg woman were exposed in the dunes above Long Beach, on Muralag (Prince of Wales Island) in the Torres Strait. The huge tide – ten centimetres higher than when monitoring began in 2015 – eroded swathes of beach and sand.
Vanishing acts
I don’t know when my sense of smell vanished, exactly. It left without fanfare, sometime during the days of fatigue and snot and rattling 4 am coughs. But I clearly recall the first time I noticed it was gone.
My archive fever
I completed a succession of degrees in creative writing, growing increasingly obsessed with finding my way back into the archive of words my mother had left me. I was determined to continue the collaborative practice we once had, though one of us would have to take part from beyond the grave.
Fragile memories
What are those pre-verbal memories like for him, not articulated, but rather felt, stored within the archive of the body? What does it feel like to have been separated from the archives of both your biological family and your homeland? There is never a clean break, of course. No neat stepping off the page, one book closed and another picked up in its place.
Defending the dead
When I think about Sarah Baartman, who lived in that same colonial city two hundred years before I did, I think about how she both belonged and did not belong in that place shaped by European fantasies of Africa. Cape Town was her city, even as it was not.
Non aprire che all’oscuro
The shop was split over two levels and relied heavily on the proprietor – a balding man with an elaborate comb-over – to connect each visitor to parts of the collection that might be of interest.
The shape of memory
I sit by the river searching for someone our national memory keepers sought to erase: my great-grandfather. Bundjalung man William Olive served across the Western Front in World War I. Aside from his digitised war record, the archives I have sought are almost silent. He enlisted when the Defence Act outlawed Aboriginal service. He suffered through two brutal offensives: the Somme and the Ypres Salient. He was wounded near Pozières in 1916, not far from this river in Amiens. William and I are separated by time and silence. But silence is a powerful act of agency. It can be revolutionary to hold your tongue, to refuse the container of words. Maybe a river can speak, but what if it, too, chooses silence?
