FINDING THE SILENCES: ENCOUNTERS IN THE GREG DENING ARCHIVE Abstract Pacific historian and anthropologist Professor Greg Dening (1931-2008) was a man of many silences. A trawl through the large archive of his papers echoes with the silences that were also Greg's fascination. In Greg Dening's metaphors of beaches and islands, the silences of the encounters between Native and Stranger were compelling. In this paper, my reflection on the Dening Archive, at once both voluminous, yet enigmatic, invites an interrogation into the poetics of engagement with archive, memory and the entangled politics of personality. Archives of the Mind In his 2004 book Beach Crossings, Greg Dening wrote “My study is an archive of my mind, an archaeological site of my spiritual and intellectual voyaging. The books that surround me are those that have taken me on my journey. …. Then there are my files. There has never been a lecture that I have heard or given, a book that I have read, or written, not an article or a chapter or a document that has not its relic in these files” 1 French philosopher Jacques Derrida reminds us of the Greek origin of ‘archive’, arkhaeion, ‘initially a house, a domicile, an address, the residence of the superior magistrates, the archons, those who commanded’.2 Here, it might be imagined, the Greg Dening Archive, housed in the mighty vaults of the State Library, is presided over by archivist-gatekeepers. The magisterial authority of these librarian-curators determines the ordering of the Archive. In this imaginary scheme, this Archive is raw material, a collected body of facts, an artefact of ‘truth’, passively awaiting the authoritative imposition of structure, form, and meaning by its custodians. This of course is a world away from the reality; I sail with freedom through the State Library’s Dening Archive, revelling in its disorder and randomness, bringing my own sense of meaning to the collection. Like a bricolage, or an assemblage, I peruse this collection, roaming its extraordinarily creative contents. There is no orderly chronology here. As I re-assemble it to produce something new, I imagine this as the archive of Greg’s mind. Is the archive a unitary body of knowledge, presenting a seamless, unquestioned collection of information? Or should we instead be more attentive to the ruptures we find in it, the fragmentations, the silences and the indeterminacies? In his essay ‘The Library of Babel’, the great Argentinian writer Borges imagined a universe of labyrinthine galleries, shelves, stairways, and mirrors. In this classic imaginative story, Borges dreams of the infinite, of the infinite possibilities of seekers of knowledge. The library’s neatly bound and ordered volumes offer profound possibilities for imperfections, uncertainties, and the infallibilities that belie their surface appearances. Borges wrote “If an eternal traveller should journey in any direction, he would find after untold centuries that the same volumes are repeated in the same disorder - which, repeated, becomes order; the Order.” 3 The State Library of Victoria’s Greg Dening Archive is a large collection, some eighty boxes, acquired in 2013. There is also a substantial collection of Greg Dening papers in the Melbourne University archives, which includes several boxes of correspondence, mostly from the period Greg was the Crawford Professor in the University’s History Department. But my interest is not only in what the archive contains, to see the collection as an unquestioned, and seamless source of information about Greg Dening’s life and work. I also want to understand what is absent from the collection and why; to explore the gaps, repetitions, the apparently random order of the material, and the silence. Here then, I am faced with two major collections of Greg Dening papers, in two of Melbourne’s most important cultural institutions, separated by a busy stretch of Swanston Street: the State Library, and Melbourne University, both founded by Redmond Barry in the nineteenth century. 1 Each of these collections has been shaped by their respective politics of archival acquisition, institutional politics, and management and accessioning over different periods of time. Not a Biography of Greg Dening The facts of Greg’s work and life are well known. There are many very fine articles and tributes written about his life and work by former students and colleagues, including Tom Griffiths, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Bronwen Douglas, David Hanlon, and Ivan Brady to name just a few. In 1994 Melbourne University’s History Department published a collection of essays edited by Donna Merwick honouring Greg’s work.4 A special issue of the journal The Contemporary Pacific, edited by his long-time colleague and friend David Hanlon at the University of Hawai’i was published in the Fall of 2009. Titled ‘Remembering Greg Dening’, it contained moving recollections by many of Greg’s former mentors, students, colleagues and friends. And of course, there is the brilliant published work of Greg, in his many books, articles and papers. Greg was born in 1931 in Newcastle, New South Wales. He received an education with the Jesuits in Perth and Melbourne, and entered the order at the age of sixteen, and later was a priest for a while. He obtained his Master of Arts at the University of Melbourne, and then a PhD in anthropology at Harvard. He taught at La Trobe University before taking up the Crawford Chair in the History Department at Melbourne University in 1971, where he remained until his retirement. The following years were very productive ones, as Greg was now free to pursue his love of research and writing, and he also ran workshops and seminars as an adjunct Professor at the ANU’s Centre for Cross-Cultural Research during these years. Together with other notable historians Donna Merwick, Rhys Isaac, Inga Clendinnen, and Bronwen Douglas, Greg was part of what became known colloquially as the ‘Melbourne School’ of ethnographic history. Greg’s award winning publications demonstrate his extraordinary imagination and innovation in writing history: Mr Bligh’s Bad Language: Passion and Theatre on the Bounty (1992); his book of essays Performances (1996); History’s Anthropology: the Death of William Gooch (1988); Readings/Writings (1988), and his last Pacific book Beach Crossings: Voyaging Across Times, Cultures and Self (2004). There were also his outstanding works on institutional histories, of the Church, and of Xavier College – further examples of Greg’s fascination with ethnographic history. One of Greg’s former students, Tom Griffiths, now one of the leading environmental historians in Australia, reflected that ‘all Greg’s teaching … was directed towards empowering the creative imagination of his students’.5 Griffiths suggests that ‘Greg’s advocacy of the creative imagination was shaped by his engagement with two different worlds’, and that Greg ‘liked being “in- between”, and this was another of his beaches’. These two worlds that Greg inhabited were those of the academy, and of public literary culture’.6 Yet, in the light of all that is known of Greg’s life and work, the silence of the archives echoes. Greg was always present in his writing; his style one of juxtaposing personal reflections, observations, and meta-commentaries on his writing and research. And yet, like the silences that so fascinated him, for all his passion for the performance and theatre of history for understanding the crossing beaches, cultures, disciplines, islands and oceans, he was a shy and private man, as I glean in conversations with some of those who knew him well. MS Dening: the Silence in the Archive I wander in search of the intriguing silence in the Greg Dening archive. Trawling through the many boxes, I find a rich body of material beyond what is known in the public record. It tells a story of the creative process of Greg’s work, of his thought processes and creative imagination, of his busy scholarly life, and of his religious life. We can learn something too of his studies at Harvard, and of his discussions with publishers, reviewers, and conference and seminar organisers. Correspondence with his wide circle of colleagues, mentors, students, friends, and acquaintances, as well as letters from people seeking advice, offering information, or simply making contact, all contribute to an 2 emerging portrait of Greg. And conversations with some of the many who knew Greg offer additional valuable insights, often informal and anecdotal. But after all this journeying, I still find the archive puzzlingly silent on the inner person: Greg’s private thoughts, reflections, meditations remain somehow elusive. I ponder the absence of Greg’s personal letters, diaries, and journals, field notebooks of his work in the Pacific. The silence is also in that the majority of letters in the archive are those that Greg received; it is like a one-sided conversation. These silences are compelling. Always given to reflection, Greg himself reflected on silences. He wrote in 1998, in his book Readings/ Writings, about his attempts to learn photography while preparing in 1974 to visit the Marquesas Islands: I had crossed a beach and found what all the beach-crossers find, my own otherness. I called the book I was writing about the land and its people Islands and Beaches: Discourses on a Silent Land. By the time I had finished it, though, I did not know whether the silence was in the land or in myself. 7 Greg’s book Islands and Beaches, published in 1980, established a major new approach to Pacific history: here was ethnographic history brilliantly done. Here too was reflective history – another of Greg’s consistent passions. I find the Dening archive tells a story about the process of making Greg’s books; the research, the writing, various drafts, and his correspondence with publishers.