4.2 Kat: History, emotion and giving back

I came to the topic of exemption when I stumbled upon a file while working in the State Archives and Records Authority of New South Wales in the early 2000s. It was an old microfilm reel of exemption applications that I had to get special permission to look at – a few years later it was closed to anyone who wasn’t related to the individuals whose lives were described within it. Once the archivists had verified that I was an academic, they set me up on a microfilm reader and off I went. In this section I describe how I began my research on the archives of exemption policies and how I have changed my approach to them over time in ways that I hope have made me a better historian.

That day in the New South Wales State Archives I was immediately struck by the stories in this file, stories of people seemingly ‘applying’ to have basic human rights, playing the game of demonstrating how closely they followed the tenets of the assimilationist policy in vogue at that time in New South Wales. To make matters worse, they were then being judged by anonymous bureaucrats on the intimate details of their lives. The files contained a mixture of awful reports on people’s behaviour and lives – whether they drank alcohol and how much, whether their houses were clean, whether they looked after their children, were married to their partner, whether they were employed. In that they were no different from other colonial records I had read. But what grabbed my attention was that they also contained letters from the people themselves, describing their lives and applying for something called ‘exemption’. What was this exemption they were applying for? Off I went, like a good little historian, to find out more. At this point in my career I wasn’t doing much collaborative work with Aboriginal people or scholars (that came later). I didn’t reach out to any Aboriginal people, institutions or communities. Instead, I went to books written by other historians, the colonial archive and finally to the Australian Research Council (ARC). The ARC gave me a grant in 2014 to search through all the state records offices for records about exemption policies. With the help of Dr Leonie Stevens, who was employed on the project as a research assistant, we collected records from Perth, Darwin, Adelaide, Sydney, Brisbane, Alice Springs and Melbourne. Then I began planning to write an academic history of exemption policies. I have a filing cabinet and a Google Drive folder full of photocopies and scans of files – application letters and forms, police reports, welfare office reports, minutes of meetings and (thanks to Leonie’s hard work) a list of all the names that appear in them.

I still haven’t written that book. Instead, as time went on, I began to question how I was doing the project. The work I was doing made me question what academic historians do and the way I had been taught to be an historian. The material was so raw, so personal, so heartbreaking, I started to feel like an intruder. I began to question whether the distance that I had from this chapter of Australian history impacted on my ability to write and research. After all, I am a white woman and I have no family history of exemption. Who am I, I asked myself, to write this? – an outsider who came across it by chance, safe on the other side of a microfilm reel on a university-funded research trip where I stayed in a nice hotel.

I didn’t come to these questions all by myself. It was partly by reading the critiques of the history profession made by Aboriginal people and scholars who have asked non-Indigenous historians to simply stop writing ‘about’ or ‘for’ Aboriginal people.^[1] It was also by talking to people who have exemption in their family and generous Indigenous colleagues. One of the most important people who taught me about exemption is Adjunct Professor Judi Wickes, the first historian to work on the history of exemption and who I met for the first time at a symposium in 2018.^[2] Since then I have been lucky enough to form a beautiful friendship with Judi, and she has been a true friend who has taken the time to guide me through this work. We are now part of a larger team of Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal scholars, largely brought together by Judi’s dedication to researching exemption.^[3]

Judi has made me realise that archives are not just there to be used as resources for my work. They have a history of their own and an ongoing power to hurt that should be taken into account. She has reminded me about how emotional this history is and how careful I need to be when I write or talk about it. When I sent her a draft of an article that I had written based on the archives in 2020, she talked to me gently and caringly about how it upset her. That article eventually became a co-written publication that was shortlisted for the 2022 Australian Historical Studies Patricia Grimshaw Prize, which is given to the article that makes the most significant contribution to our understanding of Australian history published in that year. In it we talked about how my academic writing concerning exemption had hurt Judi and taught me lessons about whether Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander stakeholders found purely academic research helpful or appropriate.^[4]

Archives, records, documents and primary sources are the historian’s toolbox. They are the evidence we use to write about the past, and our focus on them is one of the things that distinguishes us from other disciplines like anthropology and political science. Archives are often what our research is based upon, and thus how we build our careers. Historians love digging up the past for its own sake. But the colonial archive itself was based on hurt – on the collection of information without people’s consent and then the use of that information to control and subjugate. It is entirely shaped in response to the settler state. As historian Trudy Huskamp Peterson has argued, one way to think of archives, particularly those created by governments, is as the ‘caboose of the train of the state’ – following along behind, sticking to the same tracks. She argues that this shapes the history ‘it was and is possible to write’.^[5] I wonder whether it is possible, as a non-Indigenous person, to write a colonial archive-based history that is not potentially hurtful to the descendants of the people described therein.

I now feel a deep responsibility, having collected so much archival information about exemption. There are two aspects of these records that I’ve had to think deeply about. Firstly, there are some families who do not want their exemption stories told. Secondly, exemption can be painful, as it may lead to family dislocation and break ups. It is often surrounded by shame and silence. As Judi has discovered, many people would rather this history be forgotten. So it is not for me to publicise the hundreds of family histories of exemption that I have collected without speaking to those families first. The possibility exists that there are amazing stories in those archives that will never be told, and I have to work hard to silence my inner historian in order to reconcile the fact that there will be silences in my work: amazing stories of people resisting and negotiating with the policy that will likely never be told – because they are not my stories to tell.

At the same time, those archives also contain valuable information for people who might have suffered family dislocation. There are a burgeoning number of Indigenous family historians at present, individuals working hard after work and on weekends to fill the gaps in their family stories. In fact, helping more people to know about and understand the history of exemption is something that is sorely needed. Judi has made this her life’s work. Today, the history of exemption policies is still not widely known, either by mainstream or by Indigenous communities. These policies are still not included in the Australian history curriculum. This is despite the fact that throughout the country, thousands of Indigenous people were granted exemptions. It is important to note that Judi’s pioneering research uncovered more than 4,000 exemptees listed in Queensland alone.

Historians are confronted with many moral dilemmas when researching colonial archives, and those big questions have kept me awake at night. For example: Who actually owns these records? Should they be simply returned to Aboriginal communities and families or closed forever because they are so sensitive? Even though many archives are restricted because they contain such intimate and personal information, there are also many which are freely available to anyone who walks in. Some have even been digitised. Is it fair for non-Indigenous people to draw on these records to write articles and books that tell the story of settler colonial Australia and its crimes – but also further their career? On the other hand, these records are accessible to people wanting to use them to find information about their families and communities. How can universities and archival institutions support Aboriginal people through what is often a traumatic process of finding information about their families? How should historians and other researchers treat these records? What is my role in this space?

These are questions I’ve faced as I’ve worked on the history of exemption policies and wondered what to do with the information from state archives about exemption collected by Leonie and myself. So instead of writing a book I created a website (www.aboriginalexemption.com.au) as a way of dealing with this. It is supposed to operate as an invitation for people who have a family history of exemption to contact me so I can see if I have anything that might be able to help them. I worked with a fantastic website company called Digital Heritage Australia, which specialises in historical websites, to create the content. They suggested that I shoot a video to explain what the website was doing, rather than relying on lots of text. It is often older people who are doing the work of finding family history. Instead of just giving an email address I included a simple form for those who were not computer savvy. I added a page on ‘Why am I doing this?’ and included resources and information about the policy for those who might be interested. I included all of Judi’s writings, as well as other publications coming from our team.

Since the website began, I have helped about 15 to 20 people a year. We mention the website at public events when we speak and refer to it in our writings. However, most traffic comes through internet searches conducted by people exploring their family stories. Sometimes weeks go by without a hit, and then there will be a flurry and I’ll spend my weekend searching through our files and writing responses. This work is not recognised or valued by my university, but it is a joy to think that I am helping people understand their family history better, even in a small way. Often exemption is the reason for the family silence. As one person wrote to me, ‘Until today I had not known of Aboriginal Exemption as such, and I think it may answer some things regarding part of my father’s family history.’ Another wrote, ‘I know very little about their history other than what I have been able to track down in Ancestry.com and some old family stories. My Nana denied her Indigenous heritage, which I believe could have been a result of the “exemption” policy.’

For many individuals I often do not find anything. If that is the case I direct them to the appropriate Indigenous family history services (there is one in every state and territory), giving them phone numbers and email addresses and letting them know that as a family member, they will be able to access files that I cannot as an academic. Every now and then, though, the names that they send me are a ‘hit’ and I can specifically direct them to particular files, or even give scans of documents that mention their ancestor’s name or are in their ancestor’s handwriting. I am always careful not to provide any information that contains any other families’ names. Sometimes these hits generate a conversation, and we have had individuals who came to us through the website attend our symposia, or even join our team.

Probably my biggest highlight was being able to direct someone to a letter in their grandmother’s handwriting, preserved in the colonial archive. The joy of being able to help people find archives that are significant to them is a different feeling from doing academic work. It feels more important, more real, as if I am making an impact in someone’s life. It is very different from sending a piece of academic writing out into the world. I have Judi to thank for that.

The Indigenous Archives collective is a group of researchers and practitioners – both Indigenous and non-Indigenous – who want to encourage discussion about Indigenous archives, based on values of respect, integrity and social justice. They advocate for a right of reply, for the right to know what archival materials exist that pertain to them, for the right to cultural safety in the archive and for the right to control through consent how those archives are engaged with and used by all researchers.^[6] That is how I see Judi’s work; she is challenging and responding to the archives of exemption and the colonial archive itself. Together we are part of a larger team that includes other Aboriginal scholars who are working to challenge and respond to the records we collected. Our team recently received an ARC grant to research the history of Aboriginal exemption policies, but this time it is not to fund non-Indigenous historians. It is to support and encourage people with a history of exemption in their family to tell their own stories. My role is now much clearer than it was to me when I first encountered that file in Sydney, in my privileged position as a non-Indigenous woman employed by a university as a historian. It is to facilitate and support this work, not to speak over the top of it, to listen, to be responsive and to be challenged: to knock before I enter.^[7]