I am writing a novel, a work of fiction, that incorporates historical detail, family history, and popular mythology of the Western Australian community. Through the details of family and social history, I aim to tell another version of some of the history of Perth from the mid-nineteenth century to the present.

 

This story belongs to my family, but to generalise, this family has never been particularly interested in defining itself, in making public any aspects of its story. The writing will be textured with forgotten voices, it will be self-reflexive, and will tackle the paradoxes involved in telling stories from within the Western Australian family I belong to, one that resists telling its own stories because of shame and the lack of an authoritative, or socially given, voice.

 

From family history to social history, my interest is in the material that sits on the margins: the unspoken and generally unwritten histories of people who inhabited marginal spaces within this society. Histories obscured by silences. What Michel Foucault names as counter-histories. I am interested in the material which is not recorded or spoken, which nonetheless 'speaks' of a shame that shapes the ever-developing identity of a family and a community.

 

The work is informed by feminist ideas about voice and the hierarchy which licenses select people in our society to speak. Relying on the varied materials that sit between history writing and personal memories, it will follow the evidence, both written and oral, recognising how malleable memory can be: how it is selected and edited to fit particular purposes. It will recover stories from the past, tell those from the present, and look forward in interpretation, in much the same manner that Australia is engaging in: by re-viewing official history as it recognises native title, moves towards reconciliation, and debates about becoming a republic. Although you might imagine that in recent times this project has run off the rails, or at least that any leadership role has.

 

One of my purposes is to explore ideas about memory, from the individual act of memory to its transmutation into collective memory, and especially to the complexion that collective memory acquires through social symbolism, ritual, and tradition. I want to explore ideas about Jewish community and assimilation, about the beginnings of a white community in the Swan River Colony, twenty two years after invasion when my family arrived here. Central to this exploration is the question of amnesia, the slipping of family traditions within one generation, and the absences in communal history. Memory and forgetting. With regard to the family history, one such slippage is the giving up of Jewish identity within one generation, with its consequent reticence about keeping records and passing on details within the family.

 

With regard to social history, one of these slippages is the way that people outside of the dominant culture can be entirely overlooked in the figuring of the fabric of the community. I intend to reflect on family and social histories by being explicitly reflexive about my methodology - by documenting the process of research, the discoveries along the way, and my responses to the material I uncover. I want to write this quest of mine into the work, to reflect upon the process of writing biography, to do something with the paucity of information, and with all of the silences.

 

In writing this fiction, I am experimenting with narrative form to produce a work that contains within it a number of genres and practices of fiction, of social and family history, of autobiography and biography. I am intending a twin focus: a looking inwards, for self-discovery, a securing of personal identity, and a panning around place, across time, as a documentary film does when the perspective of the filmmaker is acknowledged. In this engagement with memory, I am considering its complexity, fragmentation, and unreliability, the shifting nature of memory, which is both personal and collective and social. The work is narrated by me, a first person character living in this place, Perth, now.

 

Powerful preoccupations include ideas about family, and how some patterns of behaviour and consequence in families can be so prevalent that they could be viewed in some ways as an inheritance. Questions about what a family is, what it carries, how it is defined, an opportunity to imagine those theories about the family that I have engaged with through feminist and socialist discourses as they are put into action across five generations. The family as the absolute centrepiece of our society. The patterns that occur with, for instance, female reproduction, and the particular stories that have not been handed down to subsequent generations who have been harmed, as I see it, by this lack of knowledge. Women's punishment for their sexual misdemeanours - for stepping over the bounds of sexual and then reproductive decency. Investigate legitimations, legitimacies. Illegitimate. Punishings.

 

What those silences do. How identity is formed, what is passed down. If most of the heritage of a family, its mistakes and distinctiveness is not given to the next generations, then how does that retard them? I am attempting to collect the losses, to make links, family patterns, that have been evident in this family since their arrival in Australia.

 

To recover, recuperate, exploring what is involved in forgetting and remembering, and doing this through a layering of stories, of voices, of form - so that from the first person narrative, I can ask questions, interrogate the material, be self-reflexive.

 

I have specific areas within the social history record of Western Australia that interest me and have relevance to the project that I want to hang my story up with, to set the context for the particular example of family.

These areas include:

 

- white settlement of Western Australia, and the way that the society was formulated and regulated. I am particularly interested in the politics of the society: in the motivations that settlers had for accepting the invitations offered to them, and how the colony was governed.

 

- The decision that was made in 1849 to request the British Government send the colony convict labour after 20 years of working on the idea of a free colony. What that meant to the 'fabric' of the society, the increasing imbalance of the numbers of males and females, and the idea that a 'better' type of convict might be requested and received (which just led to a fabrication of records in England). I'm looking at the details of the life of a convict, the various stages of freedom and the opportunistic policies of retention and banishments to the eastern colonies.

 

- The settlement of Jewish people and the development of a Jewish community in Western Australia. Ideas about the dis-connection between free settlers and convicts and the imperatives involved in prayer and adherence to ritual. How that enforced marriage worked.

 

- The role and lives of white and Aboriginal women in the colony - either involved or excluded, but either way affected. At a number of crucial periods, there were twice as many white men as women in the colony. As Jan Carter writes in her book, Nothing to Spare:

 

Most history is written about and from the point of view of men: the history of Western Australia is no exception. Histories describe economic and political events, in which women played no active part. In 1890, it was uncommon for the Perth newspaper, the West Australian, to refer to women, except in highly selective categories. Women were mentioned most frequently in relation to their appearances in the police courts; their second most frequent notation came as a result of their participation at gentry social functions; third, the figured in the 'Situations Vacant' pages. So, the impression of Western Australian women based strictly on a review of the newspaper columns of 1890, was that they were drunks, prostitutes, vagrants or assaulters; flower arrangers, vocalists or brides; house and parlourmaids, governesses or tutors.

 

I am filling in some of those gaps by looking at the official record and at the work of historians who have recovered some of the stories of women in 19th century Perth and Western Australia.

 

And out of the context of the men of the Krakouer family forming sexual and familial relations with Aboriginal women, I want to research the extent to which Aboriginal-white relations were viewed: whether as trangressive, or acknowledged at all.

 

In the same sort of impulse of ordering and interpretation, I am working on four time periods within my structure, which I believe are rich with event and change.

These periods are:

 

1829-1853 As the beginning of settlement and incorporating the years that Theodore and Brina arrived, met and began to have children. Theodore gained his ticket of leave in 1852.

 

1901 and the Federation of Australia, the White Australian policy - the systematic exclusion policies to deny the difference that was already in place in Australia, the unification of the nation.

 

1940s and 1950s Time of war and the changes with the influx of war refugees and migrants from different cultural backgrounds. In 1942, Nancy Krakouer, daughter of David, Theodore and Brina's youngest child, was one of four individuals charged with the serious offence of assisting within the Commonwealth a public enemy, to wit the armed forces of Japan. Charged with treason and identified as a fierce anti-Semite with a Jewish name, I want to explore that form of self-loathing.

 

1990s and, most particularly and significantly, native title and a different and developing idea of history. I am also interested in Western Australian politics, in dynasties and corruption, in the inward-looking and insular nature of politics and society in a small place like Perth, and how the way that the colony was set up might still be affecting the way that this society operates and conducts itself. A pattern that seems to occur on a loop, repeating, repeating.

 

I am exploring ideas about myth-making, I am interested in Ross Gibson's recent work about myth, particularly his focus on Badlands in Queensland. His ideas, from Levi-Strauss that a society has myths for as long as it has contradictions and until it allows difference. That myth helps us to live with contradictions. A narrative trick procedure, a quarantined area where we push the uncanny. Where we can admit that trouble occurs, but where it can be contained, sequestered, quarantined. That we can't get rid of all difference, but we can contain it.

 

And, an inspirational influence, a quote from Annette Kuhn's book about memory and family and secrets Family Secrets: Acts of Memory and Imagination :

 

Telling stories about the past, our past, is a key moment in the making of our selves. To the extent that memory provides their raw material, such narratives of identity are shaped as much by what is left out of the account - whether forgotten or repressed - as by what is actually told. Secrets haunt our memory-stories, giving them pattern and shape. Family secrets are the other side of the family's public face, of the stories family tell themselves, and the world, about themselves. Characters and happenings that do not slot neatly into the flow of the family narrative are ruthlessly edited out.

 

So, my job in this work is to write back in characters and happenings that haven't always been recorded, let alone edited out. To do this through a little detective work, but largely by imagining them.