'Aboriginal domestic service, indentured labour, and stolen wages stories are largely invisible and not widely acknowledged or understood as significant in official narratives of history in South Australia. This paper will demonstrate the importance of accessing the state's archives in order to trace assimilation-based measures targeting girls for removal from their families and for domestic labour. It also aims to theorise the violence of the colonial archive from Indigenous standpoints as a key site of memory, conservation, and erasure that continues to resonate. Such records trigger questions of government control, surveillance, representation, and agency, particularly as we encounter the gendered and racialised intimacies of everyday life. 'Archival-poetics' is introduced as a culturally and locally situated method of resistance and transformation through creative engagement with archives; one way to repatriate stories and love to our families, bridge the labour history knowledge gap in SA, and generate new knowledge with healing, decolonising intent.'
Source: Abstract.
