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Abstract
Written in memory of the first women convicts transported to Botany Bay, this unthinkable history, a concept posed by the historian, Paul Carter, is an experiment in extending the boundaries of academic remembering, so that the complex lives of those resilient women might be given recognition.
Researching the women’s lives required an ethnographic method, or ‘spatialized’ history, based on original archival research, together with research of rituals, art, literature, newspapers and music; and, importantly, the laws which circumscribed their behaviour. A research focus was thus the administration of criminal codes and the character of prominent judges, including the significance of the Recorder of London. Theories of history based on the work of philosophers such as Heidegger, Deleuze, Guattari, Derrida, Foucault and the ethical philosopher, Wyschogrod, with her feminist perspective, have influenced narrative themes and tropes.
This experimental hybridization of historical methods and the poetics of fiction might be classified as ficto-critical historiography, where ficto-critical functions as an epithet, not a polarity, as is the case with ficto-historiography and the coinage, faction. As a meditation on the ‘maybe’ of historiography, the experiment enters the debates about the relationship between history and fiction and the significance of remembering. The incompleteness of records, their silences and partialities, the forensic reading required to contextualize them, the perspective from which the narrative is told, together with the metaphorical levels of all writing, are explicitly acknowledged. Fundamental to that acknowledgement is the narrative trope of simulacra. The narrative figures are thus copies without originals; they are an acknowledgement of the absence which haunts memories, while avoiding scepticism or relativity.
The semi-omniscient, intrusive voice of the narrator, the dialogic placement of other ‘voices’, variously contrary, affirmative, informative or philosophical; together with the acknowledged artifice of narrative dramatizations in which the figures are assembled from multiple sources, are important elements in the grammar of this transgressive act of remembering with its footnotes and phantoms.