(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.

I write of trees and birds and seeds and springs and grandmothers at the State Library of New South Wales. A prose poem on the final day of a work trip where I present a paper as a trained librarian-­archivist. Too much caffeine and not enough sleep, but with a gnawing in my belly. There is an energy in this space that unsettles as much as it warms. The violence of invasion lives there under concrete and traffic, in the bones and sinew of the Land and her peoples. And so, I write. Of trees and birds and seeds and springs and grandmothers – of my place as descendant and future-­Ancestor who carries millennia of knowledge and culture and kinship. I am always writing about archives when I write this way. I cannot separate myself into contexts. The archive and ancestry are one and the same.