The Colonel and the Slave Girls: Life Writing and the Logic of History in 1830s Sydney

In revisiting an earlier essay, “From Slavery to Servitude: The Australian Exile of Elizabeth, and Constance,” I explore the complex interplay between history, life writing, and the fragments of the past, uncovering what it is that we discover when we attempt to write subaltern lives or recover the subaltern voice. Because of the fragmentary nature of historical sources, as well as the separation between the historian and historical events, historians must always forge links, the existence of which are not empirically or ontologically provable. The refashioning of the past in the present involves, then, an intertwining of fact and imagination, of logic and aesthetics. This essay is an exploration of how these different qualities were combined to create “The Australian Exile of Elizabeth and Constance.” But it is, as well, a reflection on power, sources, and the possibilities of writing subaltern lives against or, even, along the archival grain.