Natalie Harkin, Archival-Poetics

First published 2019 by Vagabond Press
www.vagabondpress.net

© Natalie Harkin 2019

Design and typography by Michael Brennan

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocop-
ying or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher. The information and
views set out in this book are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the
opinion of the publisher.

ISBN 978-1-925735-37-6

This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia
Council, its arts funding and advisory body.

ARCHIVAL-POETICS

Natalie Harkin

VAGABOND PRESS

CONTENTS

List of images 6

Archival-poetics 1 | Colonial Archive

Prelude 13

Memory Lesson 1 | Imperial Fantasy 17

Archons of Power 18

Memory Lesson 2 | Feeding the Fever 19

RSVP 21

Dear Sir 22

Under the Act 24

State Lady Report 26

Trace and Return 29

Cultural Precinct 30

Memory Lesson 3 | Afloat in the Wake 32

Ode to the Board of Anthropological Research 34

A Basket to Haunt 35

I weave back to you 35

Archive-Box Transformation 37

Archival-poetics 2 | Haunting

Rememory 45

Memory Lesson 4 | Beyond Intuition 47

Memory Lesson 5 | Potent Place of Haunting 50

Ode to Poles/Apart Tracking 53

Harts Mill Projections 56

Blood Sonnet Chronicles 61

Apron Sorrow 67

A Domestic’s Waltz 68

Memory Lesson 6 | A Way of Knowing 69

Spectres of Colonialism 70

Memory Lesson 7 | Archival-poetics Manifesto 72

Thread Offerings | for my children 73

Archival-poetics 3 | Blood Memory

Warning 81

Memory Lesson 8 | Grandmother Impressions 83

Her Memory Remember 84

Memory Lesson 9 | Blood on the Record 86

Seep/ Stir/ Signify 91

Memory Lesson 10 | Memory in the Blood 94

I Remember you as a Child 95

Whitewash/Brainwash 97

My Daughter 103

Bush Plum Lament – for Florey and Fanny 105

Love Letter Offerings 106

Acknowledgments 108
References 110

LIST OF IMAGES

1. ‘ATTENTION’, Archive-Fever-Paradox [2], 2013 in Bound and
Unbound, Sovereign Acts, Act 1, 24 August–24 September
2014, curated by Ali Gumillya Baker with the Bound Unbound
Collective (Ali Gumillya Baker, Faye Rosas Blanch, Natalie Harkin,
Simone Ulalka Tur), Fontanelle Gallery and Studios, Bowden,
Adelaide; detail. Photo: Denys Finney, 2013.

2. Postcard, Archive Fever Paradox [2], side 1, 2013, postcard,
Natalie Harkin, in nungaOdradek, curated by Ali Gumillya Baker,
15 March–13 April 2013, Australian Experimental Art Foundation.

3. ‘Dear Sir’ Video 2 still, Archive-Fever-Paradox [2], 2014,
Fontanelle Gallery and Studio, Bowden, Adelaide. Photo:
Natalie Harkin, 2013. Video: Ali Gumillya Baker & Denys Finney.

4. Exemption Certificate, Unconditional Exemption from the
Provisions of the Aborigines Act, 1934-1939. Natalie Harkin, family
record.

5. Shredding Letters (re-enactment), for Archive-Fever-Paradox
[1], 2013, in nungaOdradek, curated by Ali Gumillya Baker, 15
March–13 April 2013, Australian Experimental Art Foundation
(AEAF), Adelaide, SA. Photo: Denise Noack, 2013.

6. Weaving Letters. Natalie Harkin weaving a basket of letters
from the archives, printed onto banana bark paper. Photo:
Denise Noack, 2013.

7. Archive-Fever-Paradox [1], 2013, in nungaOdradek, curated
by Ali Gumillya Baker, 15 March–13 April 2013, Australian
Experimental Art Foundation (AEAF), Adelaide, SA; installation
detail. Photo: Daniel Harkin, 2013.

8. ‘my daughter’; basket of letters, detail. Photo: Natalie Harkin,
2014.

9. ‘The shadows of our past shall not fade’; detail of steel, stone
and concrete sculpture-art for the ‘Lartelare Aboriginal Heritage
Park’ commissioned by the developer to Taylor Cullity Lethlean.
Photo: Natalie Harkin, 2011.

6

10. ‘No ghetto for the rich’, image by Natalie Harkin and Robin
Mather, 2015, created in response to the projection of r e a’s
work onto the Harts Mill site directly opposite the Newport Quays
Consortium’s redevelopment on Kaurna land – the banks of the
Port River, Adelaide, South Australia.

11. ‘I am small at the wharf’s edge’; image by Natalie Harkin
and Robin Mather, 2015, created in response to the projection of
r e a’s work onto the Harts Mill site directly opposite the Newport
Quays Consortium’s redevelopment on Kaurna land – the banks
of the Port River, Adelaide, South Australia.

12. ‘The Ways of the Abo. Servant’, The Australian Woman’s
Mirror, 16 November 1926, magazine headline.

13. ‘Future Impressions’, photo: Teri Hoskin, 2015: Natalie Harkin
and shadows of her children on the north-facing outer wall of
the South Australian Museum North Terrace, Adelaide SA, in
Bound and Unbound, Sovereign Acts, Act 2, 2015, curated by Ali
Gumillya Baker with the Bound Unbound Collective (Ali Gumillya
Baker, Faye Rosas Blanch, Natalie Harkin, Simone Ulalka Tur), 14
October 2015, for Tarnanthi Festival of Contemporary Aboriginal
and Torres Strait Islander Art, 2015.

14. ‘I am writing’, Archive-Fever-Paradox [1], 2013, in
nungaOdradek, curated by Ali Gumillya Baker, 15 March – 13
April 2013, Australian Experimental Art Foundation (AEAF),
Adelaide, South Australia; detail. Photo: Daniel Harkin, 2013.

15. Archive-Fever-Paradox [2], 2014. Video 1 still (series of
eight). Fontanelle Gallery and Studio, Bowden, Adelaide, South
Australia. Photo: Teri Hoskin, 2019. Video: Natalie Harkin in South
Australia’s State Records, Gepps Cross, South Australia.

16.‘Domestic’; basket of letters, detail. Photo: Natalie Harkin, 2014.

17.‘Happy to be home’; basket of letters, detail. Photo: Natalie
Harkin, 2014.

7



COLONIAL ARCHIVE
ARCHIVAL-POETICS 1



1 | COLONIAL ARCHIVE

a small spotlight on the state, its institutions/ systems/ processes,
that generate and maintain particular fantasy-discourses and
representations on histories, on people; that actively silence/
suppress/exclude Indigenous voice and agency; stories and hearts
that seethe and pulse from violent repositories to rupture fixed-
imaginings, contribute counter-narratives and repatriate ‘something
else’ transformative and just; new offerings through and beyond the
colonial archive, to carry forward, for the record.

for all my family
our Grandmothers past

 

11



PRELUDE | a beginning by way of introduction to something else epic
in search for an impossible origin of the event, a preview-awakening to
the positioning of things, a warning

 

13

Our shared pasts linger

as accessibly amidst hills and along old roadways of this island

as in the texts of the library and archive.

To read either well, the other is required.

|Julie Gough, Fugitive History, 2008

 

14

first light first breath first cry

born in the wake of immeasurable loss

we rock navigate float

we keep watch with the missing
while you sleep

through deep colonialisms

 

15

It is to burn with a passion. It is never to rest, interminably, from
searching for the archive right where it slips away.
It is to run after the archive …
it is to have a compulsive, repetitive, and nostalgic desire for the
archive, an irrepressible desire to return to the origin, a homesickness,
a nostalgia for the return to the most archaic place of absolute
commencement.
|Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever, 1996
 

16

MEMORY LESSON 1 | IMPERIAL FANTASY

under the flight path on Kaurna country, a small semi-industrial
commercial zone in Adelaide’s west prides an expansive State Opera
Company storage facility next to an unassuming warehouse holding
the State’s Aboriginal Records archives; a repository pulsing, in quiet
irony, invisible traces of the most grand, tragic operatic backdrop to
our lives; enter and confront State ‘archons’ of power – the ‘superior
magistrate’ gatekeepers of no-democracy; the commanders and
legislators who assure/ensure physical security of documents and
materials, who accord themselves the right and power to gather/
unify/identify/classify, who legitimise knowledge through hierarchy
and order, who determine what is in/out/accessed/vetoed to future
memory; enter and confront an imperial-archive fantasy sustained
on infinite stories consigned to inform-perpetuate a careful crafting
of grand-narratives, of shared-histories scripted as normal that
resonate/imprint/shape past lives today; rumbling, calling, waiting
patiently for something else …

 

17

ARCHONS OF POWER

Aborigines Department | Aborigines Protection Board | Chief
Protector | Sub-Protector | Judge | Legislative Council |
Mission Superintendents | Secretary | Welfare Board | Children’s
Welfare Department | Boarding-Out Officer | Senior Probation
Officer | Probation Officer | Inspector | ‘State Ladies’ | Super
Magistrates | Matron | Queen’s Council | Deputy-Director of
Rationing | Police | Doctor | Housing Officer | Master of the
House | Probation-Branch-Psychologist | Priest | Lord Bishop |
Reverend | Sister | Mayor | Teacher | Academic | Scientific
Expert | Curator | Anthropologist | Archivist

PROPOSED REFORMS
The problem of dealing with the aboriginal population is not the
same problem that it was in the early history of the State [...] with
the gradual disappearance of the full-blood blacks, the mingling of
the black and white races, and the great increase in the number of
half-castes and quadroons, the problem is now one of assisting and
training the native so that he may become a useful member of the
community, dependent not upon charity but upon his own efforts.
To achieve this object we believe it is necessary for more direct
Government control.

– Royal Commission on The Aborigines 1913
 

18

MEMORY LESSON 2 | FEEDING THE FEVER

appetite for the archive is whetted; fever burns an irrepressible desire

to return to the origin, and disrupt/rupture with astute decolonising

intent. Prepare to be drip-fed “ACCESS DENIED” GRG-vetoed-files

that fuel this fever, hungry for paper-trails that guide a perpetual

search for new meaning between colonial, anthropological and

administrative representations; that seek loved ones lost and found

in stories that unravel on ardent hearts pulsing officially-logged

accounts; the invisible is made visible here, and the epic story unfolds

to finally reveal the State and its dystopian-drive to institutionalise/

assimilate/ control/ categorise/ collect/ contain Aboriginal lives

... there is violence here, nothing neutral or innocent in sites that

function on paradox-logic – recover and preserve / protect and

patrol / discard and conserve / revere and demonise / impress and

suppress / regulate and repress / remember and forget / alive and

dead – monolith sites feasting on records/ bones/ flesh buried deep

in this crime-scene, dormant, waiting for that cusp of light to shine

new inquiry, meaning and magical traces in dust and the in-between

almost-translucent fragile fading folds: bear witness

rage feast mourn wake-up.

 

 

19



Witness, memory, missing
it is what you overlook in the gaps, the cracks
the in-between silences
which often are the most revealing.

|Judy Watson, Blood Language, 2009

RSVP

this is an invitation bear-witness to memory work to chilling

intimate snapshots to collected-collective lives to

extraordinary acts of surveillance to social-policy experimentation

to histories of silence and forgetting to dispossession to colonial

amnesia preservation this is an invitation extended bear-

witness to re-writing the local to small rupturing contributions to

larger counter-narratives to multiple ways of sharing the load

to surviving it all to open-up to beyond what you know to get

messy to wash the blood from your hands to prepare your body

well to receive visitors nothing will be easy when you arrive

please accept

 

21

DEAR SIR

I sit between 200 pages she is rarely named
file-note archives simply their ‘girl’
a portion of a life
under state control their…

throat tight state child
catch my breath sharp half-caste
hold it quadroon
octoroon
I turn the pages true to type
of her own kind
there she is
native
perfect old-school cursive liar

so familiar nice type
obedient
never-before-spoken-of letters on probation
absconder
to Inspectors ‘State-Ladies’ Protectors difficult
tidy looking
all formal pleading polite most polite
well spoken
yearning for careless
exempt
mother home justice neglected
destitute
defying with
inmate
strength courage resilience reform-girl
consorter
in every page

resilience

I touch her handwriting

feel her finger-tips

hear her ‘husky voice’ described in

Inspector Reports

their object

their imperial-fascination

our love

bold cheeky

generous soft



22