Files, Families and the Nation: An Archival History, Perhaps

Abstract

This article uses a microhistory—a family history, a form of autoethnography—to think through the role of migration archives, and family histories of migration, within the settler colony. By exploring my grandparents’ naturalisation applications, who came to this country as Jewish Holocaust survivors and stateless refugees, I consider what we can learn from bureaucratic archives, and how we can approach the problem of how to use these archives to write histories. Centring ambivalence, uncertainty and openness, this article ponders the devastating ruins of knowledge that we are left with in the long aftermath of the Holocaust, and the ways that those of us from migrant families are implicated in ongoing genocide in Australia. Trying to ethically think alongside the work of Aboriginal scholars, and using frameworks offered by other Jewish scholars, I take seriously the question of how we can work through questions of statelessness, naturalisation, citizenship and belonging in the settler colony, as we write our histories.