Sometimes it’s more important to be able to restrict the use of your family’s image/information than to communicate it. This has come up in regards to Yuendumu in quite interesting ways http://www.warlpiri.com.au/visitors.htm has a fascinating document about how access to Yuendumu as a physical place is related to land rights, to civil liberty and to the documentation of the lives of disempowered or marginalised people.

I’ve been working with the White Australia Policy/Immigration Restriction Act records for more than ten years and it has grown to be something of an obsession. My passion for them, and for what they can tell us, comes precisely because they contain such rich information about real people.

Much of the history of the Chinese in Australia has been written from sources such as government reports, parliamentary debates and major urban newspapers, and unfortunately many of the biases of these sources have been carried through into later descriptions of the life of 19th and early 20th century Chinese Australians. My particular interest is in women, sex and the family (especially interracial families), an area in which there are stereotypes aplenty.

What I sought to do in my doctoral research was to get past the stereotypes, and the way I saw to do this was to find out all I could about real people. I manually did the kind of data matching that could now potentially be done in the online world, working from sources that gave me a bit of information here and a bit of information there, to build up something of a picture of their lives. The Immigration Restriction Act records played a big part in this, particularly in putting faces to the names, and in giving a voice to my subjects themselves.

The other thing I chose to do was to seek contact with the descendants of the individuals and families that I encountered in the archives. I put ads in newspapers, wrote to family history societies, posted to online genealogy forums and co-founded a Chinese family history group. When my thesis was completed, I made it accessible online through the Australian Digital Theses program. I did not disguise the identities of the people I wrote about either, which means that I continue to receive email from people researching their families who’ve come across my work through a simple Google search.

Because of the racism encountered by many Chinese and mixed race families, the Chinese part of family stories have often been hidden, and most of those people who contact me are just embarking on a process of discovery. Finding that the National Archives holds these records, with photographs, physical descriptions, personal and family details, the names of ancestral homes in China, signatures and sometimes letters written by family members is a revelation. In all my contact with descendants over more than a decade, I can think of no more than two instances where the families had concerns about the records being available publicly.

Making these connections between the archive, the historian and the family/community can have benefits for all of us. Every time I make contact with another family I am reminded how the archive, however rich, really only tells one part of the story of someone’s life. Getting to hear about people from the family’s perspective is a real privilege.

I tend to think therefore that there is a greater good being served by making these records, and the people in them, more visible – through better archival description (to enable name-based keyword searching, for instance), through digitisation and through projects like the one Tim and I are embarking on. It helps people to reconnect with their own pasts, and it also gives the rest of us a better understanding of how the White Australian Policy (which was ostensibly designed to limit non-white migration) affected the lives of people who were in fact Australians too.

I haven’t taken the project “out” into the family history online world yet–I will soon, when I have about 50 names done–but I’ve had some inquiries and tips already. A small house museum in the South asked if the family who owned the house sent any daughters to the school; and some tipped me to a tombstone in Gibraltar related to one of the students’ stories.