JF: Uffff.

JL: One stanza’s name is a particular schoolgirl’s name, and I thought as I read, shoot, I used to work with this person’s mother, and they were killed in an accident. The poem is about how they thought they were beautiful at school, had frivolous dreams of modelling and were killed in an accident. The poet implies that the accident was caused by the same ‘vanity and inattention’ that the writer implied they displayed at school.

JF: That lands on my ear as totally unacceptable.

JL: Back to your comment about how things have moved on – mmm. Yes and no. The second comment is that he taught in elite schools, but there were scholarship kids there who came from more modest backgrounds, and the second one is about one of those kids, and how they kept going to court all the time. And it’s like, this is a most fucked poem that fails everything on all aspects of intersectionality. Except race. Didn’t have a black student in there.

JF: Thank you for that answer, Jeanine, and thank you for your continuing work in that area. We are fortunate to have you writing and doing this work.

I wonder if we could talk about docu-memory and docu-poetry. You’ve written that the archive – the papers and photographs and objects kept in museum vaults and libraries – often erases the people behind the bits of paper. You’ve said very elegantly that the paper archive reveals as much as it conceals. I wonder if you could tell the story of going through old archival records and reports in the NSW state archive and coming across some of the snippets that were handwritten. You’ve said that you could read the mood and the emotion of those handwritten snippets.

JL: One document I came across was an old marriage certificate, when my grandmother was eventually married to a farmer (which is also a fraught story). You can see on that document the disregard. The pen that is so thick, and so scribbly around my grandmother’s name, which has a mistake in it …

JF: A lack of care and ceremony for this supposedly ceremonial document, the marriage certificate.

JL: On the one hand, these documents can be extremely clinical, non-responsive, surly. You can feel the contempt, and the power dynamic of someone who is institutionalised and the person who has the control of providing the report, who is ‘looking after you’ in this state-run institution. In letters between my parents and my aunties, they are very interesting in how you can read the mood through the handwriting. Particularly some of those older documents that would have been written while the people were there at the time …

JF: There with them, in the room …

JL: So, there is the power of that surveillance. And there’s also all they leave out. Themselves included. Who are they? Some have illegible signatures.

Docu-poetry and docu-memory is a broader archive of other things that have impacts on the lives of First Nations people, like tax books, like staged photographs. There are some pictures of my sister and me that my grandfather had staged, on the rare occasions when there was a photographer around. Photographs are very telling in themselves for what they tell and for what they don’t. There’s pictures of my sister and me playing with lambs, or playing in the garden together, and there’s other pictures of people at gatherings, and these have been taken for a different reason: to capture moments that my auntie thought were important. They’re there for sharing, and they do kind of reveal a dynamics of inequity. But you only read that afterwards. I wanted to talk about those for their value in what they might show, as any kind of visual record of peoples’ lives that they had some kind of control over, even if it wasn’t completely natural.

School reports are quite interesting as well as textbooks and medical records. When institutions come under the radar, like this notorious mental asylum in Goulburn called Kenmore that was eventually closed in the 70s, after something like 14 suicides in one year. One of my older cousins did psychiatric nursing – it’s interesting, a lot of us did professions that would kind of help us explore things that were haunting our family. There’s the textual archive, and then there’s the clinical archive and the pathologising of culture. Anyway, my cousin made some inquiries into the records at Kenmore, and they would say things like, ‘Oh, there was a fire in that wing and the records were destroyed’, or a flood. They have an amazing capacity for losing documents in fires and floods. Or, ‘Under a different management we were directed to shred them, and that person is no longer living.’

JF: Whether those lines are suspicious, or whether it’s an intentional lack of care towards the archives, it speaks to the Australian amnesia. The will towards amnesia, the lack of care towards records that a colonial subject might encounter later and put that white history on the cutting board. Fascinating. Is engagement with archives an element of the forthcoming book, Garimarra?

JL: There is a section that does deal with that. It’s been informed more recently by some of the work I’ve been doing, not just on the family archives – which I should say include objects as well, like my grandmother’s sewing tin, and old corsets she used to wear – I’ve been doing some work with visual artists, one in particular who works on Australian archival plunder. They’re working with the Nicholas Baudin expedition to Australia, a French guy who came to Australia under Napoleon, and brought back one of the most extensive hoards. He’s largely written out of history, because he’s problematic to the British, he was quite a radical guy, and wrote a land rights treatise. He was not typical of his times, a bit of a radical in some ways, but not in terms of archival plunder. He did take heaps of animals and plants. When he got back, Napoleon was busy with the war and didn’t want them anymore, so some of them got hocked off to zoos and things like that, and mostly perished. There’s one skeleton of an extinct emu that survives in a museum over there. I’ve been doing some work as well with archival translation and the violence of translation.

JF: Sounds fascinating.

JL: I’ve probably got another poem or two that relates to the Baudin expedition. The fact that he’s, interestingly, been written out of the historical narrative as well.