The Archive, Digitisation and Labour’s History
Edited by Diane Kirkby and Claire Lowrie
Labour Activists’ Archival Assemblages and Resistibility in Memory Work: Emma Goldman, Jean Désirée, and Rose Pesotta
Maria Tamboukou
Centring the lives and traces of three women labour activists contributes to labour history by showing how archival form becomes a terrain of struggle where questions of work, visibility, and historical legitimacy remain unsettled. In this article I examine the archival afterlives of Jean Désirée, Emma Goldman, and Rose Pesotta to develop the concept of archival assemblages and introduce resistibility as a critical method for engaging the politics of historical visibility in labour history. Each was embedded in distinct traditions of socialist, anarchist, and trade union struggle, and left behind a fragmented or overdetermined archival presence. By tracing the unstable configurations through which their memory circulates I argue that the archive functions as a volatile field of meaning, shaped by material contingencies, affective investments, and epistemic tensions. The article intervenes in feminist memory studies and archival theory by foregrounding resistibility as a condition of the archive itself: its capacity to delay closure, generate friction, and open space for alternative temporalities and political imaginaries. This approach reframes the archive as an active and contested assemblage, where acts of remembering are entangled with acts of refusal, erasure, and reconfiguration. Archival assemblages, I suggest, not only preserve but also unsettle memory, offering new ways of understanding how histories of political labour are made, disrupted, and made again.
Recovering the History of Chinese Amahs Travelling to Britain, 1840s–1930s
Claire Lowrie
This article analyses the history of the travelling Chinese amahs (nursemaids) that came to Britain with employer families. Chinese amahs were engaged to care for children on voyages from Singapore, Hong Kong and China to London from the mid-nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth century. Very little is known about the lives of these women and their stories have not been acknowledged in histories of Chinese labour migration. This article seeks to recover the history of Chinese amahs in Britain by drawing on fragmentary historical evidence, including shipping records, immigration documents, newspaper articles, employers’ memoirs, and institutional archives. I argue that while the mass digitisation of historical records presents new opportunities for bringing to light the stories of mobile subaltern workers, it has not resolved the challenges associated with research of this kind.
Trouble on the Roads: Using Digital Techniques to Explore Convict Protest in Van Diemen’s Land
Monika Schwarz, Michael Quinlan, and Hamish Maxwell-Stewart
It is now known that convicts engaged in widespread work-related dissent in New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land, and that dissent climaxed in 1833–34 undermining the penal transportation as a system of labour exploitation. This article explores resistance patterns within a particular road party, Notman’s Gang in Northern Tasmania between 1831 and 1834. An important aim is to demonstrate how quantitative data can be used to place qualitative observations within a wider context. Using a range of digital techniques in conjunction with qualitative analysis, we demonstrate the gang operated as a de facto penal station marked by levels of punishment surpassing those meted out at the notorious settlement at Macquarie Harbour. We also chart the extraordinary level of collective resistance in this gang identifying their origins, the key activists and the administrative impacts of that resistance. We show the inter-linkages between different modes of protest and the relations and networks that developed between groups and individuals, using these to provide new insights into patterns of convict dissent.
“As a Stewardess Sees It”: Locating Experience and Emotion in the Work of Australian Ship Stewardesses
Diane Kirkby
This first study undertaken of Australian ship stewardesses draws attention to specific aspects of working in the male-dominated maritime industry. It takes a feminist methodology that looks to women-authored sources to find evidence of experience not visible in traditional union and business archives. The article makes a case for Letters to the Editor as a source for accessing emotions in labour history. These letters allow women’s voices to be foregrounded and provide insights into women’s workplace experiences of sexual harassment, the public-private domain of their work, and gendered concepts like ambition and heroism. Letters reveal girls’ continuing aspirations for paid work.
Panopticon to Plexus: Analysing Colonial Labour and Migration in 1820s NSW
Mark A. McLean, David Andrew Roberts, and Martin Gibbs
The records of colonial Australia, where unfree work and outputs were systematically recorded across many years, constitute an astonishingly vast and rich labour history archive, much of it recorded in tabular form and thus immediately suited to transcription and digital analysis. In this article, we depart from conventional tabular data constructs and employ graph database technology, enabling us to investigate the structured and unstructured contents of our records. Employing this technology, we investigate a cohort of around 2,000 male convicts in the early colony of New South Wales, tracking their working lives through their arrival, servitude and emancipation. We trace their changing occupations and where they lived and worked after they gained freedom to choose their own employment. As a result, we discover that the occupations of convicts during the period 1822–1828 were highly dynamic, with the data also suggesting social connections between convicts played a diminished role in free worker migrations and employment. Through this demonstration of a new technology and method, we open the door to more nuanced ways of locating workers and labour in the archives.
Becoming Visible: Aboriginal Domestic Servants in Digitised Photographic Archives from Queensland and New South Wales
Srishti Guha
This article analyses digitised photographs of Aboriginal women and girls employed in domestic service in Queensland and New South Wales from the 1880s to the 1930s. My key argument is that digitised studio and family portraits that include Aboriginal domestic workers reveal the complexities and anxieties of a white colonial power operating at home. I also suggest that this form of visual culture contains traces of Aboriginal self-assertion and “self-fashioning” in an historical context in which there was an active effort to forget, overlook, and exclude Indigenous presence. As well as analysing these photographs in their own right, this article considers the afterlives of images in terms of how they function as a form of Indigenous memory and have been reclaimed and reinterpreted by contemporary Aboriginal Australian artists and descendants.
FORUM ON METHODS
Digitizing the Experiences of Migrant Labour in Qatar
Karine Walther, Zahra Babar, Trish Kahle, Suzi Mirgani, Misba Bhatti, Nadya Sbaiti, and Noha Aboueldahab
This article focuses on the multidisciplinary methodological approaches that undergird the Digitizing Experiences of Migrant Labor in Qatar research project. This project is building a publicly accessible digital archive of oral histories, the first of its kind in the Arabian Gulf, allowing migrants to narrate their own experiences in their own voices and expanding our understanding of migration in the region. By leveraging digital tools, the project aims to democratise knowledge production and extend access beyond academic audiences to migrant communities themselves, prospective migrants, and their families. The authors of this article, who come from a range of disciplinary backgrounds, discuss the methodological and ethical dimensions of creating and disseminating a digital oral history archive. What does it mean to centre the voices of migrants in a space where they have historically been marginalised? How do we balance the imperative of access with concerns about privacy, security, and potential risks of voice identification? What are the limits of anonymisation in an era where digital traces are increasingly difficult to erase? We argue that the act of listening to migrants in their own voices holds an ethical and political power that is lost in conventional text-based formats.
Re-Writing History from the Margins: Philippine Labour Migration to and Labour Organising in 1970s Denmark
Nina Trige Andersen
When Filipinas began entering Denmark in unprecedented numbers from the mid-2000s, this group of migrants gained substantial political, scholarly, and media attention. This seemingly sudden inflow of workers from another continent – who at this point primarily entered through so-called au pair visa – was treated as an isolated, contemporary, and unintelligible phenomenon, clouded in moral panic. However, the au pair migration was but the latest type of entry in a long history of labour migration from the Philippines to Denmark that commenced in the 1960s, a period marked by development of guest worker programs in Western and Northern Europe and emergence of state brokered labour export in the Philippines. Though recruitment of Philippine labour for the service sector in Europe has been substantial since the 1960s, and though Filipinas came to play a significant role in the Danish hotel and restaurant workers union, they had fallen through the cracks of both labour and migration history. Through oral history and collection of source material neglected by archival institutions, it became possible to restore the connections between these two fields, to create a Philippine history of Denmark by tracing the lives of Filipinas recruited for hotel work, and by documenting and narrating a previously unaccounted for extent of involvement by the Philippine state.
Photography as Labour and Industry: Reading Photographic Archives of Indentured Labour
Paolo Magagnoli
How can we analyse the myriads of photographs of nineteenth-century indentured workers scattered across Australian libraries and museum collections? Using Harriett Brims’ 1890s photographs of Australian South Sea Islanders as a case study, the article offers a valuable contribution to labour history methodology. While historians have examined archival images of South Sea Islanders searching for evidence of slavery, art historians have tended to focus on the photographer’s unique skills and craftsmanship. Their methodologies risk obscuring the economic and social relations that underpinned the production of photographs in colonial capitalism. In fact, colonial photographers were businesspeople that made a living selling promotional pictures of plantations and mines. As entrepreneurs, they extracted value and labour from their subjects. Instead of looking at photographs as evidence of physical violence and coercion or as expressions of the unique talent of the photographer-as-artist, we must then recognise the invisible exploitation of the workers depicted in them, whether they were willing or unwilling participants in the production of the images. This way we can bring a more critical awareness to photographic archives.
RESEARCH NOTES
Hidden Voices: Exploring South Sea Islander Narratives in the James Cook University Library’s Special Collections
Adele Zubrzycka
Archival collections contribute to identity formation and maintenance, yet they can be places of silence and exclusion. This Research Note explores the capacity for the James Cook University Library’s William Sloane and Co., Charles Young, Bowen Downs Station, Ayr Tramway Joint Board, and Henry Braby and Co. collections to tell the stories of South Sea Islanders in north Queensland. It finds that South Sea Islander voices were selectively included and excluded in these records, although fragmentary evidence of South Sea Islander agency, particularly their efforts to negotiate wages under exploitative conditions survive. These findings emphasise the silences, ambiguities and omissions that individuals, communities, archivists and researchers must navigate in their efforts to construct South Sea Islander narratives of the past.
How Well Is Labour History Served by Trove?
Frank Bongiorno
The National Library of Australia’s (NLA) Trove database – and here I am more particularly concerned with its newspaper holdings – is widely and correctly regarded as an outstanding resource for the nation, as well as a means of making vast amounts of Australian material available globally. It is a boon to academic and professional researchers who would once have had to spend weeks and months in research tasks that might now take hours or minutes. It has greatly enhanced community access to resources, allowing family and community historians in far-flung areas open access to collections that would once have been beyond the grasp of all but the well-off: that is, those able to make a trip to Canberra. The spirit of democracy is strong with Trove but at the same time, it has been chronically underfunded, it is limited in what it offers for the last 70 years, and some kinds of publications are better represented than others. What are the implications of a database that ends for most titles in 1954, for instance, for our understanding of the role of Indigenous people, of women, and of non-British migrants in Australian labour history? So, the question I ask here is: How well is labour history served by Trove? To borrow the theme of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s famous essay, does it allow the subaltern to speak? My purpose is activist as much as expository and analytical. At a time when the new government has restored some much-needed funding to national collecting institutions, including Trove, what should the community of labour historians be asking for? What mechanisms should the NLA establish to allow communities, and especially marginalised and under-represented communities, to have their say about what should be included?