Tarnished memory: ‘Emily’s Story’ and my family tree

Emily’s story

The impetus for this article arises from a digitised document stored on a memory stick, which cannot, at present, be found. This currently unviewable document, however, is in no sense lost. It comes to mind at odd moments as an image, an object, an animated thing. It hovers at the edge of consciousness. It prods for recognition, recollection and response. The writing of this article, then, is an attempt to respond, to speak back to the insistent memory-image of a digitised newspaper report concerning a trial that took place in Sydney, New South Wales, in May 1870. It is also an attempt to ‘think with’ Paul Ricoeur on the question of the faithfulness of the memory-image to the past – even as memory itself is tarnished and chastened in the settler context by the ‘small miracle of recognition’ (Ricoeur, 2004).

The origin of my digitised newspaper clipping, the reason for its appearance in my inbox, can be traced back to the publication of ‘Emily’s story’ in Mark McKenna’s Looking for Blackfellas’ Point (McKenna, 2002). This highly awarded book cut through the history wars of the 1990s by bringing to the fore micro-histories of intimate encounters between Aboriginal and settler communities in the Eden-Monaro region of south-east New South Wales. Like Inga Clendinnen’s Dancing with Strangers (Clendinnen, 2003), McKenna’s book drew on cultural memory, and the first person to break the deadlock of the history wars, long polarised between ‘black armband’ and ‘white blindfold’ versions of the nation’s origins in colonial violence. ¹ The historical imagination of McKenna’s book is strongly oriented towards the politics of reconciliation, widening the audience for local history. ² In the book, McKenna (2002) posits ‘the history of forgetting’ or the ‘cult of disremembering’ in the settler communities of Eden-Monaro as an obstacle to reconciliation (pp. 62–64). Highlighting the settlers’ ongoing struggle to reconcile the facts of colonial history with family and community memory, he argues that ‘the way in which they had come to imagine their own past’ (p. 95), not only as proud pioneers but as ‘victims of singular neglect’ (p. 135), precluded any obligation to reconcile their memory of the past with those of local Aboriginal communities. This cult of disremembering is exemplified by ‘Emily’s story’.

‘Emily’s story’ is less than four pages long. In these few pages, McKenna composes a concise micro-narrative based on newspaper reports of the testimony given in a Sydney courtroom in 1870 by 20-year-old Emily Wintle. Her testimony accuses her foster family, the pioneering Tarlintons, of covering up the birth, strangulation and burial of a baby girl on Sunday 9 April 1864 by the Tarlinton daughters, Margaret and Elizabeth. Despite the compelling evidence of Emily’s testimony and the baby’s bones dug up by Bega police at the Tarlinton property 5 years after the crime, the Sydney jury concurred with those members of the Tarlinton and Wintle families who maintained that the matter was best forgotten – with the jury foreman expressing the hope that the trial itself would not ‘leave a stain’ on the character of the accused. The hidden pregnancy of the daughter of a pioneering family, resulting in the crime of infanticide, however, was not the only issue at stake in the trial. In the local community to this day, through the agency of the Bega Family History Museum, the trial of 1870 is remembered as ‘the black baby’ story. According to Emily’s testimony, the father of Margaret Tarlinton’s baby girl – the ‘little wretch’ born with ‘black and curly hair, its skin dark and yellow’ – was most likely Dick Bolloway, a station hand on the Tarlinton property, referred to in newspaper reports as a ‘half-caste’ and in Emily’s testimony as a ‘darkie’ (McKenna, 2002: 81).

My concern here is not the historical truth of Emily Wintle’s testimony, so powerfully narrated by McKenna. Rather, what I share with McKenna is the desire to understand the metaphoric power of the figures and scenes that arise from the story. ³ McKenna (2002) understands one compelling scene, ‘the midnight burial of an Aboriginal child’, as a double erasure of both ‘the history of sexual relations between black and white’, and ‘a history of frivolity and sexual pleasure, a history of shared humanity’ (p. 83). For me, what’s at stake in ‘Emily’s story’ is not so much the erasure of history but the tenacity of childhood memory when historians confront us with figures and scenes that tarnish the family tree. My interest is in how future generations come to recognise the past as close or distant, as familiar or other, as demanding a response or even a reckoning. My purpose, then, is to explore how the wish for our ancestors to be good entails resistance to historical truth and complicates the commitment to reconciliation in the settler nation. ⁴

Memory, recollection and recognition

In his attempt to elucidate the proper working of memory in relation to reconciliation or ‘difficult forgiveness’, Paul Ricoeur (2004) asserts that memory (faire mémoire) is ‘summed up in recognition’:

I consider recognition to be the small miracle of memory […] when it does take place, in thumbing through a photo album … or in the silent evocation of a being who is absent or gone forever, the cry escapes: ‘That is her! That is him!’ And the same greeting accompanies step by step, with less lively colors, an event recollected … a state of affairs once again raised to the level of ‘recognition’. (p. 495)

How then might a state of affairs, long buried or disremembered, be recognised as a vital concern of the present? In the above quote, Ricoeur deploys Aristotle’s distinction between memory silently evoked (mneme) and an event recollected (anamnesis). In the next two sections, I want to trace recognition as it occurs across these two modes, beginning with memory silently evoked by ‘Emily’s story’, before turning to memory as active recollection in the reality television series, Who do you think you are? In the final section, I return to the question of forgetting as erasure, the possibility of happy memory and the prospect of incognito forgiveness when distant and strange others are recognised as close relations.

Tarnished memory

If I say that ‘Emily’s story’ demands a response from me, how did this come about, if not through recognition? Reading McKenna’s book cover to cover, it was ‘Emily’s story’ that arrested my attention. It took hold of my imagination, resonating with childhood memory, while the details of McKenna’s other stories blurred and faded. Reading ‘Emily’s story’, I ‘knew’ that place, that family, that mentality, although I had left the Bega valley with my family when I was 5 years old. I recognised not the distant Tarlintons but the familiar tropes: parents far away in Sydney on a lengthy visit, their offspring left at home (to milk the cows); a younger girl eavesdropping on her foster sisters in the middle of the night; the father’s threat to break his daughter’s legs if he caught her ‘skylarking’ with the station hand again; the code of silence protecting the pioneer family’s good name; and Emily’s struggle with conscience, confession, guilt and sin. However, this was recognition without responsibility: a disquieting but pleasurable moment of déjà vu.

Three elements of the story, however, failed to ring a bell: 14-year-old Emily breaking ranks and speaking out, time and again; Margaret and Elizabeth Tarlinton surviving the trial of 1870 with their reputations apparently intact; and the presence of the Aboriginal station hand, Dick Bolloway. How did it happen that Emily, alone, refused to recognise and obey the code of silence? What made it possible for the trial to be reported in newspapers across the country, and yet, for the sisters to return home ‘without a stain’ on their characters? And how did Dick Bolloway happen to be ‘skylarking’ with Margaret Tarlinton in the 1860s, given ‘the dispersion’ of Aboriginal peoples by the squatters in the 1830s? Did the community’s entrenched denial of the crimes of dispossession, committed by squatters and selectors alike, make it a small matter to erase (or forgive) the crime of infanticide in the case of ‘the black baby’?

These questions, along with ‘Emily’s story’, lodge in my imagination, not as fiction but as affect. For several years, the story is neither forgotten nor actively recalled. Its compelling scenes are simply there, held in reserve. Until a phone call from my sister, an active collector of family history, produces a shock of non-recognition: ‘Are you sitting down? Uncle Vin says Elizabeth Tarlinton is our great-grandmother’. The words form a frieze on the back wall of my memory: Elizabeth Tarlinton is our great-grandmother. I regard this frieze, these words, with stubborn disbelief. I cannot recognise Elizabeth Tarlinton as part of my family tree.

The memory of that phone call does not go away nor does it play out in my imagination. As Bergson says, our memory ‘remains attached to the past by its deepest roots’; moreover, if the memory-image did not retain something of this rootedness in the past ‘we should never know it for a memory’ (Bergson in Ricoeur, 2004: 433). The only hint of a Tarlin[g]ton in our family, that I recall, is a glamorous 1920s wedding photograph displayed at a family reunion many years ago. ⁵ But then I see, with my own eyes, a published version of my father’s family tree. The Tarlin[g]tons occupy a branch with names and dates, marriages and births: Elizabeth and Margaret are both there, married with children. Their names are now inescapably close. As it turned out, Elizabeth Tarlin[g]ton’s reputation survived the trial and she married a Coman. Her daughter, Ellen Coman, married a Collins. Ellen Coman is my grandmother. Ellen’s close-knit children – my father, my aunties and my uncles – along with my 56 first cousins, were the matrix of my childhood identity, of knowing who I was and where I came from.

In December 2009, I meet Mark McKenna at a conference dinner in Sydney, and 6 months later, in Dublin, at a workshop on memory and the uses of the past. Sometime in 2010, the digitised newspaper report of the 1870 trial arrives by email. My eyes skim over it before I store it on a memory stick. Like the published family tree, the newspaper clipping cannot be refuted. But still the ‘small miracle of recognition’ fails to occur. ‘Emily’s story’ lives in the background of my writing on settler-colonial cinema, traumatic memory, the history wars, frontier violence, and reconciliation. ⁶ It floats to mind during acupuncture, leaving an eddy of affect. Tarnished childhood memory, like sorrowful melancholy, is seductive. It would be possible to stay within its grip forever. But then, quite suddenly, returning from a family barbeque, I realise that Elizabeth Tarlin[g]ton is as close to me, in time, as my mother is to her great-granddaughter, Ivy Elisabeth. A cry of recognition escapes. It’s her! It’s them! It’s me! Great-grandmother Elizabeth’s hands held my grandmother. They could have held me. When Elizabeth and Margaret gave birth, when they held their newborns, when they nursed their grandchildren, did a memory flash up of that first birth? If that birth, that baby’s first cries, slipped their minds, did their hands remember the black silk petticoat wrapped around her body, the strip of white calico tied around her neck?

In recounting the taking hold of ‘Emily’s story’ in my memory and imagination over the course of a decade, I have drawn on Ricoeur (2004) to rethink ‘the stage where recognition blossoms as déjà vu’ (p. 54). He argues, ‘in the moment of recognition [… we] feel and indeed know that something has happened, something has taken place, which has implicated us’ (Ricoeur, 2004: 54–55, my emphasis). But déjà vu recognition, ‘silently’ or involuntarily evoked, can lock us into childhood memory and its tenacious residue as affect. How then to deliver what recognition asks of us in the settler-colonial nation: to abandon the happy memory of our innocuous family trees; to resist the sorrowful, floating life of tarnished memory; to give up the cult of disremembering and engage with the past from the perspective of reconciliation? Departing from Ricoeur, I want to propose that it takes the ‘miracle of recognition’ – arrived at through the process of anamnesis or ‘effortful recollection’ – to remove the shine from déjà vu memory (mneme) and gradually loosen its affective hold. ⁷

Chastened recognition

For now, I want to turn away from Emily, Elizabeth and Margaret (and the truncated branch that might have added the Bolloway name and an Aboriginal kinship system to my family tree) to consider, instead, the spectacle of chastened recollection offered to settler Australians in Series 4 of Who do you think you are? – broadcast on the multicultural channel, SBS-TV (Beaton and Bryant, 2012).The televised process of step-by-step recollection puts my problem – of relinquishing childhood memory – into the public sphere. Effortful recollection, that step-by-step search for a reliable version of the past – undertaken by local celebrities at the behest of television producers, archivists and historians – is at the heart of Who do you think you are? In this television format, fragments of family memory, legend or folklore (retained by parents, grandparents or cousins) are supplemented, superseded or verified by genealogical research. As a reality TV format with a historical twist, this programme insists on the factual pole of memory’s bipolar vocation – ‘to remain focused on the facts’ rather than ‘spin off into fantasy’ (Terdiman, 2003: 194). Newspaper articles, shipping records, photographs and certificates (of birth, death, baptism and marriage) become the privileged tools of effortful recollection. But this insistence on the factual pole of memory is met with trepidation by both the celebrity and the viewer who share the apprehension that something unfamiliar, unheimlich, from the documented past could have a claim on me.

In his rigorous account of the relationship between memory and imagination, Ricoeur aligns recognition with real-ization. Grappling with the phenomenon of memory evoked as an image, Ricoeur distances the memory-image from the pole of fantasy/hallucination/fiction. His aim is to draw memory away from the de-realizing pole of the fictive. At stake for Ricoeur (2004), in attracting the memory-image to the pole of the real is the reliability of memory as a province of the imagination, and of history as a province of memory:

[T]his putting-into-images, bordering on the hallucinatory function of imagination, constitutes a sort of weakness, a discredit, a loss of reliability for memory. [… However,] in the moment of recognition, in which the effort of recollection is completed, this search for truth declares itself. We then feel and indeed know that something has happened, something has taken place, which has implicated us as agents, as patients, as witnesses. Let us call this search for truth, faithfulness. (pp. 54–55)

In Who do you think you are? the trepidation of the celebrity–viewer, coming face to face with the documentary record under the gaze of the camera, is evident in the mix of bravado and diffidence exhibited by the celebrities as they embark on their respective journeys. However, quite rapidly, this bravado gives way to chastened recognition brought on by the implacability of the historical documents in the hands of the experts. Under the gaze of the camera, these documents threaten to erode our faith in deeply rooted family memories. At the same time, the documented past seeks something from us ‘as agents, as patients, as witnesses’.

In Who do you think you are? a distinctive pattern of recollection marks each episode. Although the effort of recollection has already been undertaken by the archivists, historians and writers, each episode unfolds as if the search is being undertaken in the present by the celebrity – accompanied by the viewer who is closely aligned with the celebrity’s passive process of discovery and reaction. When the episode begins, the celebrity and the viewer both appear to be in the dark, while the invisible narrator and the team of experts, on and off screen, already know the surprises that lie ahead. What then is the work of recollection undertaken by the dual figure of the celebrity–viewer? In the hands of the experts, the celebrity–viewer comes into contact with compelling scenes from the past, scenes concealed behind the names and dates that form the branches of the family tree. These figures and scenes – already selected, documented and interpreted by the archivists and scriptwriters – require an affective response, performed by the celebrity in mandatory reaction shots. Through a step-by-step process of guarded curiosity, affective resistance and chastened recognition, the celebrity–viewer seems to come into possession of figures from the past. However, when the documentary record has been exhausted and the carefully selected stories have been pieced together, the celebrity–viewer arrives back in the present, transformed by the encounter – not with the past, but with the documents that have taken on the auratic gaze of the past. ⁸ In this sense, it is the past that comes to take possession of the celebrity–viewer.

What is most distinctive about these televised encounters is that the search, the effortful process of recollection and the moments of recognition are condensed into a television hour (52 minutes) with two storylines and advertising breaks built into each episode. This televisual temporality, imposed on the process of recollection, condenses the play of resistance and belief, speculation and realisation, so that the moments of recognition seem premature. They arrive too soon, only to be quickly wrapped up in a quasi-redemptive ending. Within these formal limits, however, the series is a communal resource, providing a national space for shared recollection and auratic memory in the aftermath of the history wars and in the context of the long haul of reconciliation. ⁹

On the question of auratic memory as a matter of distance and closeness, Ricoeur (2004) argues that the happy or successful outcome of recollection is ‘the small miracle of recognition’, the miracle that is able ‘to coat with presence the otherness of that which is over and gone’ (p. 39). The degree of otherness, however, varies:

The otherness is close to zero in the feeling of familiarity: one finds one’s bearings, one feels at ease, at home (heimlich) in the enjoyment of the past revived. The otherness, in contrast, is at its height in the feeling of strangeness (the famous … ‘uncanny’). It is maintained at its median degree when the event recalled is … traced ‘back there where it was’. (Ricoeur, 2004: 39)

The median degree of otherness is how ‘historical knowledge restores its object to the kingdom of the expired past’ (Ricoeur, 2004: 39). In Who do you think you are? the experts, aided by the anonymous narrator, aim to bring the otherness of the past close, but not too close, rendering history as neither too familiar nor too uncanny. However, whether this ideal degree of otherness restores the memory-objects – those fascinating but troubling archival records – to the median distance of the expired past is an open question. Overwhelmingly, the affective forces in Series 4 of Who do you think you are? converge around the wish for our close relations to be exonerated from guilt – for their crimes to be consigned to the expired past. Given Australia’s recent origins in convictism, violent dispossession of Indigenous peoples and waves of immigration often driven by civil war, how can this wish be fulfilled through recollection or anamnesis, the search or quest that Aristotle (Ricoeur, 2004: 18) insists can take many wrong turns go in many directions?

Three episodes of Who do you think you are? exemplify the ways in which the celebrity–viewer’s encounters with the documentary records do not always favour the median distance of historical knowledge. In Episode 2 of Series 4, Kerry O’Brien, long-term anchor of a national current affairs programme, is given a tough call: the first line of research reveals his ancestor, Charles O’Brien, fleeing the famine in Ireland, surviving typhus and quarantine on arrival and becoming a successful publican, only to go into bankruptcy, repeatedly, before ending his days as a caretaker indebted to his more successful shipboard companions. The second line of research proves even more chastening: O’Brien’s convict ancestors, like the publican, get off to a relatively good start in the convict colony, but inexplicably Patrick McEvoy, his wife Hannah and their children leave the wealthy, rural estate their labour has helped to build over many years, to move to the slums of Sydney in the late 1840s. From this point, the historical record reveals a steady string of offences, committed mostly by O’Brien’s great-great-grandmother, Hannah Lenehan (aka Anne McEvoy). Her recorded offences include running a bawdy house (or brothel), assault, theft and drunkenness. Initially, O’Brien responds with wry humour rather than shame, finding Hannah ‘wonderfully colourful’. However, the miserable convict taint running through the documentary record of poverty-related crime gradually reduces O’Brien to silence. It is only the record of Hannah’s daughter giving birth to O’Brien’s grandmother, Jane Razey, that enables him to find a way ‘out of the dark side’. Because his Irish convict past is a ‘litany of disasters’ that cannot be redeemed, in his concluding statement O’Brien pinpoints his ‘tough’ grandmother as the origin of the O’Brien family’s ‘stability’. For O’Brien, the median distance of history is not available: it cannot contain the unheimlich otherness of his convict and Irish immigrant ancestors. The unheimlich, unrecognisable otherness of Hannah’s criminality puts O’Brien’s identity at risk, but a photograph of his grandmother (holding Kerry and his sister) offers him something familiar: he finds his bearings in ‘the enjoyment of the past revived’.

A different temporality, of chastened recognition and reparation, is evident in Melissa George’s episode. An early start to her acting career took George away from home at the age of 16. Who do you think you are? gave her a chance to return home, and to fill in the missing pieces in her family tree with the help of her mother. Although willing to play her part, George initially holds herself aloof from any obligation to the past: ‘what happened in the past … good or bad’ was ‘all worth it’; what matters is the present and the future, not what got us here. Like most participants, George is used to the television camera. However, this time, she is cast in a role where the script requires her to react to documents and photographs placed before her by archivists, distant relatives and historians. The first storyline takes her to Rottnest Island where her great-great-great-grandfather, a former silk ribbon weaver, was appointed third-in-command of the notorious Rottnest prison for Aboriginal men incarcerated during and after the frontier wars. A brutal death in custody in 1862 placed a question mark over her ancestor’s character that George cannot countenance. After some suspense, an obituary, written two decades after the damning events at Rottnest, is interpreted in such a way as to confirm George’s faith in her ancestor as a good and honourable man, despite the injustices of the colonial penal system in which he served for many years.

In the second storyline, George instantly recognises her unknown great-grandfather in a photograph produced by distant relatives: ‘That’s Ted! That’s him!’ What she cannot recognise (believe) is that she might belong to the kind of family that would send its children to the colonies under a child migration scheme, to be trained as farm labourers and servants. When we learn that Ted was assigned to the Fairbridge Farm School by his widowed mother, instead of following up this line of enquiry, the programme abruptly shifts focus to Ted’s wife, Lillian. In her case, it was the stepmother who signed the papers exiling young Lillian, Doris and their brother Reg to a rural training school in Western Australia. While the documentary record keeps family memory in check, there is one happy moment when the archive confirms the faithfulness, the reliability of fragmented childhood memory. A British historian reveals that there really was a baby in a coffin, the very one that Doris remembered kissing as a 6-year-old, just before she and her siblings were sent alone to Australia. More than the dry ink of the historical record, this faithful memory – the only one the family had retained down the generations – brought the story of child migration home, making it familiar rather than uncanny, giving it back to the family rather than leaving it to history.

In Ricoeur’s terms, reserving our approbation for close relations occludes the larger injustices committed by distant others – in George’s case, the injustices of Indigenous incarceration and child migration schemes. In the rush to bring the episode to a happy conclusion, George appears content to consign the collective aspects of the story back to history as ‘the expired past’. Her obligation to the past will be met by erecting a headstone over the unmarked grave of the unfortunate couple whose early deaths sent their young children to Australia. Having settled the debt to these close relations, George ends her journey on a carefree note of ordinary, happy memory: ‘What’s lovely is that I have all their faces now […] We know the answers. There’s no secrets anymore’. This mode of successful recognition becoming carefree or insouciant memory will be taken up below.

A different temporality – of promises made and promises broken, of debt passed on to future generations – occurs in the final episode of Series 4, featuring Sydney Swans football star, Michael O’Loughlin. This episode provides a fitting finale for the series: it reveals two compelling figures from the past, barely remembered by O’Loughlin despite their public commemoration in the nation’s currency, memorials and museums. In O’Loughlin’s family tree, there are two extraordinary ancestors whose stories dispel the common belief that the present is more enlightened than the past. On one side is Kudnarto, the first Aboriginal woman to marry a settler, Thomas Adams, in 1848, and the first Kaurna woman to be granted land (land taken from her people just 12 years earlier when the colony of South Australia was established in 1836). Kudnarto’s story reveals a more enlightened form of colonialism than that imposed on her two sons, Tom and Tim Adams. Tom’s story, in particular, exemplifies the struggle to survive colonialism’s rapid retreat from earlier forms of recognition in favour of new forms of dispossession, the cruelty of which is hard to fathom.

On the other side of O’Loughlin’s family tree is the towering figure of Milerum, the last fully initiated Ngarrindjeri man and a gun shearer, who is commemorated with his wife on the Australian 50-dollar note. With great foresight and determination, Milerum worked with anthropologist, Norman Tindale, to map Aboriginal relations to land and to leave extensive records of Ngarrindjeri culture at a time when oral tradition and learning by ‘sitting down on country’ were under severe threat. While the camera seeks reaction shots from O’Loughlin at highly coded ‘moving moments’, he admits to being ‘overwhelmed’ but keeps his counsel until the end. Like the other participants in the series, there is a tension in O’Loughlin’s performance. He is being taken on a journey of recollection mapped out in advance by professional others. Along the way, we glimpse family members who also have an investment in the search but the gaze is on O’Loughlin, as is the burden of affective response. At the very end of the episode, O’Loughlin, now confident of his identity, concludes:

I look back on what Milerum has done … I can sort of see him staring straight through me … Being able to show the way and share culture, tell stories … I think he’d be looking at me and expecting that of me.

Here, the Indigenous and colonial pasts are not consigned to the distant otherness of the unheimlich or the uncanny – as is the convict past in the Kerry O’Brien episode. Nor are the stories of Kudnarto and Milerum consigned to the median otherness of history as the ‘expired past’ – as are the Rottnest prison system and the child migration scheme in the Melissa George episode. Rather, the promises broken in Kudnarto’s story, and the promises made and kept by Milerum and Tindale, are brought close but not in the enjoyable heimlich sense of ‘the past revived’. Rather, these promises, broken and kept, demand something from us. They become ‘ours’ when O’Loughlin includes us in the shared obligation as ‘one nation now’ to ‘live and learn and listen’.

Bringing this shared obligation closer to home, what have not I wanted to know in my encounters with ‘Emily’s story’? From the first reading, it was not Emily who fixated my attention, but the two sisters, Elizabeth and Margaret – long before I realised they were a close branch of my family tree. However, there are others in this story who took much longer to capture my imagination. The most overlooked, the most silent, is the female child, wrapped in a black silk petticoat, who would have been a Bolloway girl had she been allowed to live. What might she say about my stubborn need for an untarnished family tree? Would she agree with Freud that childhood memory is a form of blocked memory, or with Ricoeur (2004) that passive forgetting is ‘wanting-not-to-know’? (p. 449). Perhaps, like Avery Gordon (1997), this Bolloway girl might call Emily’s story a ghost story, a case of ‘inarticulate experiences, of symptoms and screen memories, of spiralling affects, of more than one story at a time, of … domains of experience that are anything but transparent and referential’ (p. 25). Maybe not. More likely, this Bolloway girl, who would have been an older cousin to my grandmother, Ellen Coman, might say that the Tarlin[g]ton family tree missed an opportunity to branch out, to intertwine with other family trees, other kinship systems, and to shake loose other stories.

Incognito forgiveness

Confronting ‘the immensity of the task’ of settlers ‘taking responsibility for dispossession’, McKenna concludes that ‘the historian must try to explain how our history and their history are not separate histories, but part of the continuing story of post-1788 Australia. The local dilemma is the national dilemma’ (McKenna, 2002: 94–95). While much work on post-colonial remembering and reconciliation draws on metaphors of spectrality and haunting, on the uncanny and the ghostly, for Ricoeur (2004), the problem of remembering, oriented towards reconciliation, entails a horizon of memory appeased, of forgetting-in-reserve:

Forgetting and forgiveness, separately and together, designate the horizon of our entire investigation. […] for forgetting, the problematic of memory and faithfulness to the past; for forgiveness, guilt and reconciliation with the past. Together […]: Horizon of a memory appeased, even of a happy forgetting. (p. 412)

The question of a happy forgetting, for Ricoeur, involves the retention (or loss) of different kinds of traces: the archival or documentary trace, the cortical trace identified by neuroscience and the psychical trace explored by Freud. Ricoeur (2004) finds the psychical trace the most problematic and the most significant: ‘it consists in the passive persistence of first impressions: an event has struck us, touched us, affected us, and the affective mark remains in our minds’ (p. 427).

The tenacity of the affective mark of foundational memory, the persistence of first impressions, might be what troubles settler memory when it comes to the politics of reconciliation. What would it take to appease unhappy memory, to bring about a happy forgetting (a forgetting-in-reserve rather than erasure) in settler-colonial remembering? Ricoeur’s epilogue on forgiveness and reconciliation as the horizon common to memory, history and forgetting, has something to offer here. Beginning with the impossibility of forgiveness in the face of unpardonable guilt (criminal, political, moral and metaphysical), Ricoeur (2004) turns to Klaus M. Kodalle’s concept of incognito forgiveness, developed in the latter’s work on moral responsibility and the ‘pious vow’ of reconciliation between enemy peoples (p. 477). What Kodalle proposes is ‘the idea of normalcy in the relations between neighbouring enemies. He conceives of normalcy as a sort of incognito forgiveness … Not, he says, fraternization but proper behaviour in relations of exchange’ (Ricoeur, 2004: 477). The idea of normalcy between peoples whom history has made enemies depends, here, on ‘a culture of consideration (Nachsichtlichkeit) on the civic and cosmopolitan scale’ (Ricoeur, 2004: 477).

How then might incognito forgiveness offer a more viable route to ‘happy memory’ than consigning unpalatable events and guilty ancestors to the median distance of ‘the expired past’, or to an even more distant, unrecognisable, unheimlich past? For Ricoeur, happy memory, ‘under the sign of forgiveness’ is the capacity to recognise that ‘the guilty person is to be considered capable of something other than his offenses and his faults’. Incognito forgiveness is not cheap exoneration: it rests on the ‘restored capacity’ for ‘small acts of consideration’ that attest – ‘you are better than your actions’ (Ricoeur, 2004: 493).

Let me end, then, by describing an instance of incognito forgiveness I came across in the foyer of the Royal Women’s Hospital in Melbourne, while taking a break from writing this article to visit a friend who, by a strange coincidence, had just given her newborn the middle names, Elisabeth Margaret. In the hospital foyer, two oversized photographic works hang side by side (Figures 1 and 2).

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 1.

Bindi Cole, Seedtime.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 2.

Bindi Cole, Harvest.

The first, Seedtime, features the shape of a baby outlined in bottles and dummies in chocolate, brown and beige. Fanning out from the baby-shape are rows of seeds in a range of sizes, colours and textures. The second photograph, Harvest, features a softly floating grey heart made of emu feathers, surrounded by native flowers, gumnuts and gum leaves. ¹⁰ These photographs are of two large tableaux made by the artist, Bindi Cole, for the Royal Women’s Hospital Contemporary Aboriginal Art Commission in 2012. Seedtime references the history of children removed from their mothers under hospital policy up until 1975 and the coercive treatment of Aboriginal women and their babies until the recent past. The seeds can be understood as a sign of incognito forgiveness, recognising the hospital’s ‘restored capacity’ to grow a civic and cosmopolitan ‘culture of consideration’ generated by its reconciliation policy, in place since 1998. Harvest references Bindi Cole’s Wathaurong ancestors through the emu feathers, while the heart, flowers and gumnuts recognise the ethic of care and concern extended by hospital staff to their patients (the little gumnuts). In Harvest, we might see ‘memory-as care’, or what Ricoeur (2004) calls ‘the concerned disposition established in duration’ (p. 505). In this disposition of care, Ricoeur (2004) sees the potential for a ‘supreme form of forgetting, a way of being in the world which would be insouciance, carefreeness’ (p. 505). Together, the two photographs propose that Indigenous and settler memories can live side by side in a ‘culture of consideration’, rather than a culture of disremembering.

In my encounters with ‘Emily’s story’ and the more orchestrated encounters with the ancestors of Kerry O’Brien, Melissa George and Michael O’Loughlin, the affective mark of familial memory has been troubled by the historical record. Although the duration of the process of recollection and recognition in real life has been different from that of reality TV, the experience of chastened recognition has been similar. While I would like to end on a carefree note of insouciance, with ‘reconciled memory’ as one of the ‘figures of happiness that our memory wishes for ourselves and our close relations’ (Ricoeur, 2004: 496), what comes to mind instead is a part of Emily’s testimony, recounted by McKenna (2002):

Margaret warned her that she would ‘fetch her into it’ if Emily dared tell anyone. Sometime later … she asked Margaret what she should say to the priest. She was worried that if she didn’t confess what she had seen, she would remain in a state of sin. Margaret told her it was not Emily’s sin to confess. She told Emily she would confess to the priest herself, and again warned her not to tell anyone. (p. 81)

Time and again, Emily tries to tell, and time and again, she is threatened with punishment if she tells anyone. In all the years of being told not to tell, Emily lives side by side with those whose sin she would like to confess. Would it be too much to read into Emily’s story a disposition of concern, a modicum of care, of faith in the capacity of Elizabeth and Margaret, as well as Mrs Tarlinton and even her own punitive father, Mr Wintle, to be better than their actions? Reading ‘Emily’s story’ again, with Ricoeur’s monumental work in hand, this new possibility opens up. However, like memory and recognition, consideration and forgiveness can fail. If forgiveness depends on telling someone who listens and absolves, then Emily might find herself in agreement with Ricoeur (2004): ‘Always in retreat, this horizon [of forgiveness] slips away from my grasp … It places a seal of incompleteness on the entire enterprise’ (p. 457).