Axon: Creative Explorations

Drawing on the Irish notion of a ‘thin place’ (where the veil between us and the spirit world is so thin that we can sense those on the other side), this paper outlines an approach to archival research and creative practice which seeks to reawaken and give voice to the ghosts of some of Australia’s earliest refugees. This work uncovers new connections between the Great Irish Famine, a humanitarian crisis which halved Ireland’s population and the cyclical incarceration and abuse of young women in New South Wales in the 1860s and 1870s—to highlight a small but significant, yet largely unwritten, chapter in Irish-Australian history. Employing poetics of resistance incorporating elements of these young women’s outlawed native Irish language and culture, this work seeks to decolonise their memories and restore voice to those who suffered the brutal consequences of colonisation in both their native and adopted countries.

When exploring the relationship between her Irish ancestry and her creativity, Roxanne learned that women’s poetry in Ireland was largely obliterated from the literary canon and missing from the archives. Early Irish poetry was often anonymous, and scholars presumed this indicated male authorship even when written with a female persona. However, while women’s poetry may have, as Mary N Harris says, gone ‘unnoticed and unpublished’, the lack of archival evidence does not indicate that women were not composing poetry and an increasing body of academic research supports this argument. The mythological collection makes significant references to female poets, and oral poetry such as the lullaby and the lament commonly went unrecorded. Irish poets, including Eavan Boland and Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, demonstrate that contemporary poetry can bridge the gap where female poets were actively written out of history to a new understanding of the importance of their contribution.

Rachel Kaufman argues the ‘archival poem brings to bear the rhythms of the past through the language of the present’ (2021: 21). Indeed, it is a unique genre for its ability to ‘hold in balance discordant images and thoughts’ (26) in its presentation of dissonant simultaneities—a quality critical to representing historical traumas, particularly those related to slavery and race. Through processes of disassembling and fracturing, archival poetry exposes the silences and redactions within ‘official’ histories by marking and blurring the borderlines of past and present, subject and object. Examining M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong!, poetry grounded in the materiality of archival sources, this paper explores how the past might be defamiliarized to reveal that which is hidden or suppressed. In doing so, it contends that creative practice engaged with the archives offers the subversive potential to resist totalising historical accounts, whilst conveying the complex horrors of racial violence and oppression.

Poetry is one way of documenting what is missed, excluded and neglected by institutionalised archives. Smaller cohorts of migrants and refugees with a reliance on oral stories to record their existence risk minimisation of their impact, influence and contribution to the collective memory of Australia. The experiences of migrants and refugees from Cyprus are recorded mostly through the prism and value-system of two dominating cultures: a British-centric culture and a Hellenic (Greek) culture. This paper seeks to show an alternative documentation of the Cypriot-Greek Australian-based diaspora. Through interviews with several Cypriot-Greek poets and a study of their poetry, a poetic biography of Cypriot-Greek diasporic identity can be created, one that is nuanced and memorable.

Imperial Greek rhetoricians defined ecphrasis as ‘descriptive speech which brings the subject shown before the eyes with visual vividness’ (Squire 2015: n.p.), since which time understandings of ekphrasis have evolved and narrowed. Recently, however, definitions of ekphrasis have been expanding to incorporate new media, digital images and augmented reality that engage with haptic and auditive experiences. The ancient concept of energeia—‘the evocation of a visual scene in all its details and colours’ (Cave 1976: 6)—is relevant to these new understandings, including in the presentation of the kind of archival material housed in the Helen Shea collection at Emerson College. Digital ekphrasis, such as one finds in the Klimt: The Immersive Experience installation, open up possibilities for fluid and wide-ranging representations of archival material, along with powerful considerations of this material’s relationships to complex social interactions. Such digital ekphrasis is able to evoke visual scenes in great detail and cast new and creative light on ekphrastic relationships.

This paper references the writing of the Australia Council funded verse novel The Sorry Tale of the Mignonette and the additional print folio created as a practical example of using formal and informal archives and the extent that places, people, and material form enabling networks for the production of new work. Because I trained as a visual artist rather than as a writer, I find it very difficult to confine myself to working solely in one medium. Archival material is not merely stored as a static and revered object but is capable of becoming mobilised and motivated by use, and to affect the practice of the artist/writer through ideas, travel and social contacts. The archive grows through the networks it assumes with the past and new material created from it, showing the circularity of creative production around archival material and its sites.

This essay presents a poetic life writing practice developed through material exploration with diaries, to expose hidden, unwritten traces of anorexic experience that escape the archival page. Anorexia flouts tenets of traditional autobiography, skewing memory and breaking the ‘autobiographical pact’ of a truthful and consistent narrator. This article presents poetic digression and fragmentation to perform physical and cognitive anorexic intensities. This writing offers a counter-history to archival documents, leaden as they were with the voices of anorexia and medical discourse.

Female poets seeking to have their work published in Australian literary journals in the second half of the twentieth century faced a predominantly male culture: most positions as poetry editor for major journals were held by male poets. This study of the rate of publication of female poets from 1945 to 1990 in those journals also investigates the rate of submission by female poets. Using archival material not previously researched for this purpose, it is shown that the rate of publication of female poets is well below their rate of submission for most of that period. The misogynistic attitudes of some male editors are also evident.

Graffiti observed on signs and monuments associated with Captain James Cook are used here as a departure point for considering the ways in which different narratives about Cook (e.g. authorised, monumental, vernacular, imaginary) are assigned value. Our particular focus here concerns the role that graffiti has played in producing counter-narratives to the hegemony of a particular national discourse that celebrates Cook—with a focus on a theme in Australian popular culture that strips Cook of his pants and his dignity. This leads to a consideration of how graffiti might be approached in some instances as a legitimate mode of reparative writing against colonialism and its effects. In the Australian context the intensification of activist graffiti on monuments may signal a growing community awareness of historic injustices, the surfacing of rituals of recognition and reparation, and a growing desire of the broader community to play a role in the (re)construction of public memory. Interventions of this kind could be construed as an unconventional channel through which the dialogue of democracy can take place.