By Michele Leggott The Turnbull Typings It is like looking at ghosts. The Alexander Turnbull Library holds typed copies of four letters written by Sarah Harris in New Plymouth to her father and sisters in England 1841 and 1843. Thanks to an accompanying note dated 1922, we know more or less how the copies came Read More…
Tag: archives
Flames and archives
In her diaries from the 1880s Emily Harris tells two stories about burning. The first concerns the destruction of a diary when she was a young woman in Taranaki in the late 1850s. She is painfully conscious of the loss her action imposed at the time and regrets it still: Well, long ago, some seven Read More…
Sail | Walk | Drown: The Wandering Texts of Sarah and Emily Harris
‘My sweet babe.’ Thirty years after losing her five-day-old daughter on the voyage to New Zealand, Sarah Harris can barely speak of the experience. Her words wander across the notebook page, she breaks off, starts again, cannot find words or syntax to convey her feelings. Phrases trail off, repeats falter. She can’t find her way, Read More…