Absence and Intimacy: Remaking colonial families

This lecture traces the interplay of intimacy and absence in two very different archival records created by emigrant families who arrived in Sydney during the 1830s. John Rae (1813-1900), later Sydney’s Town Clerk, left almost all his family behind in Scotland when he emigrated in 1839, and for some fifteen years after his arrival he retained a copy of every letter he wrote home. His carefully preserved, one-sided correspondence became the repository of his imagined relationship with his distant relatives and the site of its continual reinvention. Likewise, his depiction of new relationships formed in the colony and his evolving familial identity – from brother and son to husband and father – was in part a performative, self-conscious fashioning of colonial family life. While Rae’s correspondence offers important evidence about family relationships, his letters were also tools, wielded to fashion his family anew in a context of separation and loss.

In direct contrast to Rae’s neat and voluminous record, the ‘archive’ of the Thompson family, drapers of Sydney, is composed of gaps and fragments. This archival absence, I argue, is a direct effect of propinquity and intimacy. Twelve siblings and their parents emigrated between 1834 and 1839, forging new lives and new families in the vicinity of Sydney while retaining a close interest in each other’s business. We know from occasional references in family memoirs that Thompson letters could carry weight: they might advance a courtship or a business prospect, spark a family feud, or activate a network of support. But they were not preserved as a colonial record of social or historical significance. The few that remain seem to have survived by accident, and their potential effect remains opaque. Nonetheless, the missing letters amount to an unexpectedly revealing ‘phantom archive’ of a middle-class emigrant family.

Historians of intimacy are accustomed to working with fragments, making the most of their archival presence. This lecture suggests that what is not there may be as significant as what is.