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Pauline McLeod was an Aboriginal performer, writer and storyteller who, at the time of her death at the age of 43 in 2003, left an archive of 34 boxes of writing: poems, diaries, notes, playscripts, film ideas and letters. Amongst the completed scripts and story drafts were also many examples of jotted notes and ideas, phrases and paragraphs, mostly undated. Also amidst the ephemera of her life were bus tickets, electricity bills and birthday cards, as well as a few letters, reports and reviews pertaining to Pauline but authored by other people. After she died her brothers cleared her flat, packing her things into the boxes. They were hoping that someone would use this material to tell Pauline’s life story, and after being contacted by a mutual friend I have now spent some time working on the project.
It is my intention to use only material found in the boxes to tell Pauline’s life story. To complete this process I have been literally ‘unpacking’ Pauline’s work, scanning anything I think could be included in a biographical construct.
The story that will emerge will describe how she was fostered and later adopted, what life in her adopting family was like, how she met her natural family and how her adopting family disowned her after this took place. It will also cover her subsequent battle with mental illness which sometimes left her institutionalised, as well as her discovery of Aboriginal culture. I intend to explore how she came to rely on these experiences both for strength and for her career as a storyteller and writer.
In this paper I will describe some of these facets of Pauline’s life, as well as attempting a brief discussion of some of the theoretical aspects I have been exploring as part of the compilation process.
Given the possible reasons Pauline had for writing, and the likelihood of omissions of other aspects relevant to her ‘complete’ life story, it is appropriate that potential readers be given information on the nature of the text in advance of their reading it so they understand that they do not have the ‘complete’ version of something that was not complete in the first place. It is important, too, that the reader knows something of me – at a minimum, that I am male and non-Indigenous. They should know how I came to the project, the length of time I worked on it and what I hope will be the final result. They should understand my arrangement of Pauline’s life, and that it is my attempt to convey what I understand to be the meaning of her words. My hope is that the presented life is recognisable to those who remember her, yet is also capable of offering new insights.
Pauline was born in March 1960 and wrote throughout her life. She kept much of her work, with the earliest surviving piece appearing to be a diary written in early 1976. The following extract is from the 1976 diary, New Years Day.
We came home today after a week at our cousin’s place. Last night we stayed up till 2 o’clock. It was fun. We had a little party and music. At 9 o’clock we started home and at 3 we reached home. It was hot and we went to sleep as soon as our jobs were done. Our TV broke. Pappa is going to try and get it fixed. My Bible verse for today:
Our Lord and our God. With joy in thee. Without, Thy heir we could not face unafraid the year before us.
God, please help me. Amen.[1]
As well as journals Pauline also wrote plays, poems, stories, letters and notes, while keeping miscellaneous other items including drawings, sketches, cartoons and photographs. The challenge for me in assembling this material is to create a cohesive narrative from the fragments, to let Pauline tell ‘her own story’ but in a myriad of forms, to allow the whole to become clear from the sum of many parts. I am still transcribing the material to be included in Pauline’s story. Having read through all the documents I have found that there is enough to give a thorough account of her life, told in her own words, or through words that Pauline herself collected, either as letters written to her or as reviews. The challenge is how to determine not only what to include, but in what order to place the chosen extracts. In total there are over 3500 pages of documents, far more than most people wanting to find out about Pauline would be willing to sift through if left unedited. My intention is to construct a familiar autobiographical-type life story, with a beginning, middle and end.[2] This will require a solid period of assembly, as well as some editing to create a satisfactory narrative structure. While the cultural and gender-related content of this story requires discussion outside the scope of this paper, it is appropriate to here discuss some aspects of the editorial process used to create the story.
What Pauline wrote in her diaries was probably not intended for verbatim reproduction. It is arguable whether her creative work, too, would have undergone some sort of editorial process prior to publication. Although there are arguments against editorial intervention of Indigenous texts, including ‘gubbarising’[3] it, I have taken the approach that this process is, to some degree, a valid methodology for the kind of story I am creating in this case. In his book, A shared authority, Michael Frisch argues that if necessary, the process of editing material obtained from oral history can sometimes require ‘a relatively aggressive, even manipulative approach to the “actual” text (being) the best way to faithfully convey its real meaning and essence’.[4] While Pauline’s work is not oral history, I feel that some editorial intervention is appropriate to present her story to an audience unfamiliar with her life and writing.
Pauline’s papers are a unique glimpse into her own experiences, much of them written as diary entries. In examining her journals, Pauline made the following notes:
Notes on Diary and Journal Writing from ‘The New Diary’[5]
Diary uses:
Developing creativity
Problem solving
Self discovery
Self reliance and self help[6]
Like many diaries and other works written in the form of a journal there is no indication that what remains is indeed an accurate reflection of the life. Indeed, if the criteria above represent how Pauline saw her diary writing, then it is possible to conceive of her diaries as material created only when she needed to develop her creativity, had a problem to solve, was looking inwardly or was suffering from self-doubt. The weighting of particular accounts also deserves examination. What, for example, are we to make of the fact that Pauline mentioned her personal relationships so infrequently, and then almost flippantly? The absence of a serious examination of something most people consider important to their lives demands its own interpretation.
[1] McLeod: Diary extract, 1 January 1976. Pauline created many documents, of which a large proportion are undated or are fragments. All those presented in this document come from the collection held by her brothers. The archive is informal, and this is reflected in the structure of the citations for them. Some of Pauline’s observations relate to events earlier in her life, so it should not be assumed that her comments were made contemporaneously with the events they describe.
[2] Exploration of cultural content, authorial authority and other aspects of the compilation process not discussed in this paper are also part of my PhD research, and will be explored in greater detail in my forthcoming exegesis.
[3] Heiss 2003: 66.
[4] Frisch 1990: 56.
[5] Pauline’s notes from Rainer 1980 c1978.
[6] McLeod: Diary extract, undated, possibly c1990.