This Special Issue of Life Writing emerged from a workshop initially co-organised by Jerome de Groot and Tanya Evans. They planned to hold this in collaboration with the Society of Australian Genealogists (SAG) in Kent Street, Sydney, Australia in April 2020. Evans had previously collaborated with SAG on several occasions since 2012 through different research projects on family history (Evans 2015, 2022). These collaborations included interactive talks, help with recruitment on family history research projects, the dissemination of research on the practice and meanings of family history and networking among family historians. At the time, de Groot and Evans were co-authoring an article on the value of collaborative public history projects in Australia and Britain, both focused on their international engagements with the family history community (Evans, de Groot, and Stallard Forthcoming). They held two successful, lively, interactive, participatory and well-attended workshops including international scholarly researchers on family history together with family historians at Manchester City Library in the UK in September 2017 (de Groot and Evans 2017) and at the State Library of New South Wales in Sydney in July 2018 (Evans and de Groot 2019). Covid 19 prevented Jerome’s travel to Australia in early 2020 and the whole world went into lockdown soon after. We hoped the workshop might encourage everyone to re-evaluate the research practices and interests of family historians which we knew to be often scathingly defined by others as unscientific, uncritical, emotional and of little value to the academy or anyone else bar individual researchers’ families.' (Tanya Evans & Marian Lorrison : Family History and Life Writing : Introduction)
'In the settler colonial context, family histories can be key places to explore the relations between Indigenous and settler families, past and present. In this paper we examine this use of family history with reference to a historical photographic collection that links our two families. The Thomas Dick Photographic Collection (TDPC) was produced over a ten-year period, from 1910 to 1920, as a collaboration between the amateur photographer Thomas Dick and several Birrpai families. The photographs, reflecting Dick's colonial mindset, were staged as pre-contact and sought to depict Birrpai life of a century earlier. The images are now held in local, national and international collections. The TDPC holds particular familial significance for both Heath and Barnwell, who are respectively descendants of the Bugg-Dungay family (featured in the photographs) and the Dick family (the photographer). Heath is the foremost expert on Dick's Birrpai collection, and has done extensive work; to locate the photographs in inter/national collections; to determine and correctly label the participants and places featured; and to develop a set of cultural protocols for its use in dialogue with a Family Stakeholder Group (FSG) and key collecting institutions. The FSG Protocols provide an indication of the value and use of the images as preferred by descendants. In this paper we write about the role of the photographs as family photographs in both the Bugg-Dungay family and the Dick family, including when we each first saw the photographs and what these initial encounters reveal about how such photographs, when looking at them and beyond them, can be used to both construct and deconstruct settler mythologies of time and history.' (Publication abstract)
'Renée Erdos was a history teacher and distance educator whose significance to Australian and international education was recognised in 2021 with an entry in the Australian Dictionary of Biography. During her lifetime Erdos published a memoir, Teaching Beyond the Campus, and has left a collection of papers with the National Library of Australia. However, this material deals almost exclusively with her professional life. Her family history and personal life have been difficult to reconstruct even though the digital revolution and access to online resources such as Trove and Ancestry.com have helped to reveal more of the traces of her past. This article reflects on the way in which old-fashioned serendipity and collaboration resulting from chance encounters with researchers in different fields have played a role in providing access to otherwise hidden sources and information. The stories that emerge are interesting and add new dimensions to our understanding of Erdos's early life. Even though the serendipity and collaboration have been mediated by the internet and its instantaneous international reach, they highlight the way in which life writing can thrive on personal meetings across the range of historical practice, including family history.'(Publication abstract)
