Eldershaw Memorial Lecture - Family Archives, Feminist Readings: Reflections on Intimacy and Absence

The digital age has transformed archival research, enabling historians to access and link sources in ways that were once unimaginable. Nowhere is this truer than for family history, where sparse genealogical detail can readily be amplified by what would once have been needle-in-a-haystack searches of newspapers, parish records, court records, passenger lists and the like. Tantalising glimpses of our ancestors rise like miracles from their dry surroundings, seeming to promise anew and deeper understanding of their intimate, lived experience. How far can we trust that promise? For all their apparent amplitude, the sources of family history remain fragmentary and unequal. They still privilege public over private life, the coloniser over the colonised, the capitalist over the worker, paid over unpaid labour, mobility over stillness, the exceptional over the commonplace, the convict over the meekly law-abiding. They still skew towards patrilineal descent and patriarchal authority.

In this paper Professor Russell probes the possibilities and limits of family history from a feminist perspective. Using stories from her own research, she proposes questions and methodologies that seek to confront, rather than reproduce, the structural gendered inequities of archival sources. How do we balance pressing ideological concerns of the present with the quest to understand the past on its own terms? Can we use archival absence as evidence? Can empathy fill the gaps of record? Is there a place for feminist imagination? 

Penny Russell is Professor Emerita of History at The University of Sydney, where she was the Bicentennial Professor of Australian History from 2013 to 2021. Her many publications on the colonial history of gender, family and status include Savage or Civilised? Manners in Colonial Australia, which won the NSW Premier’s Award for Australian History. A Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, she was visiting Professor of Australian Studies at Harvard University in 2016-17 and the Ross Steele AM Fellow at the State Library of NSW in 2023. In 2022 she was an inaugural recipient of the Australian Historical Association Lifetime Achievement Award.