1995: Preface to the Third Volume in the Series
Arthur Frederick Blandy, D.Phil. (Syd.), sometime Fellow in Genealogical Studies
It has been put to me—by the more forthright among the reviewers of the second volume, and by at least one late‑night radio host with an injurious sense of irony—that these works are “wilfully opaque.” To this charge I plead neither guilty nor innocent. I confess only to a certain temperamental inability to abbreviate the truth, which is a frailty endemic to the conscientious reader and the failed editor alike. The present volume, like its precursors, is not a text in the vulgar commercial sense but a repository: a filing‑cabinet masquerading as a narrative, each drawer misleadingly labelled and sometimes, through no fault of the historian, incorrectly indexed. I do not wish to defend the system—only to remind the reader that systems themselves are, with few exceptions, innocent conspiracies.
I should add that the years printed at the head of several pages are not, as some have speculated, chapter numbers or typographical embarrassments. They are years, but not always those years. Their function is not chronological but gravitational: they draw adjacent papers into a field of influence, permitting like with like to orbit and sometimes collide. This principle I derived, not from historiography (as my students charitably presume), but from my late father’s method of storing receipts in tea tins marked 1959–86. He insisted the markings referred not to the years of purchase but to “the temperature of the decade.” You will, I trust, find the analogy instructive.
Certain readers—whom I hesitate to call general—will prefer to begin with the documents classed as “Letters Concerning the Flood.” They are easier, in the way that a wrong direction can be easier to follow than the correct one. For those who still possess the first volume (and I must apologise for the publisher’s withdrawal of the second, following the dispute over the photograph), the cross‑references will appear almost too plentiful. The correspondence between Part II, document 7 (“Miss Quale to Dr. Perret, unposted”) and Appendix C of the present volume is intentional, if not precise. The odd and unkind suggestion that I “do not know what my own intentions are” was made by Professor D. C. Bligh in The Journal of Annotated Narratives (Vol. 8, 1992). She is approximately correct.
If the reader senses a faint argument sustained across centuries, this is neither an accident nor a boast. The series proposes itself as a debate conducted between ancestors. The dead, as a class, are commendably punctual; they will wait, sometimes with civility, until one’s conclusions are ready to be misunderstood. Each document, no matter how trivial the subject—birth certificates, grocery lists, sermons from the east coast floods of ’67—contains a contractual fragment of this long dispute. The trick (so far as it can be taught) is to remember that message and messenger rarely coincide.
I should perhaps note that I was never entirely satisfied with the title Fragments Toward an Inland Archive, but it has been used so persistently in footnotes by junior researchers that to alter it now would seem petulant. The subtitle, Book Three: Correspondences and the Fever of Years, is my own compromise, though I regret the choice of “fever,” which implies a heat inappropriate to archival study. My late supervisor, Professor Octavia Mallard OAM, once warned that every archive contains a hidden weather report, and that “too many drafts make a gale.” I took this to mean that arrangement itself alters the climate.
The astute reader—and here I address those to whom opacity is a sport rather than a grievance—will soon observe that the arrangement is not uniform. Documents marked “A” are arranged by a species of sympathy rather than sequence; those assigned “B” owe their order to an anonymous record‑keeper whose principles are yet undiscovered. (I have resisted the temptation to identify this individual, though there are reasons to suspect the hand of the same Reverend who misdated the donor register of St. Cedric’s in the 1880s.) In short, the order generates its distortions, a fact which I report but cannot ethically remedy.
The publisher insists upon a brief guide to the bibliographical curiosities. Of these, only a few merit notice. Bibliographer P. J. Trotman describes On the Precedent of Incomplete Records (Melbourne, 1974) as “a compendium of half‑facts methodically bound into irrelevance.” It may be relied upon. Similarly trustworthy, though less readable, is Marjorie Lenz’s Catalogue of Known Errors, Western Pacific Division, published by mistake in two identical editions. As for the so‑called “Erratum Volume,” which some have taken for a parody of the first, I can vouch (having supplied the printer’s copy myself) that its contradictions are genuine.
I wish to apologise, at this late juncture, for a small but recurring confusion regarding the author’s initials. The earlier volumes bore the name A. S. Blandy, an error of the typesetter, whose habit of middle initials is pathologic. The addition of “S.” (which stands for nothing) persists in some libraries. Readers citing my work are urged to omit it, though I am aware that the distinction changes nothing essential.
To anticipate another objection: yes, the footnotes occasionally contradict the main text. That is because one speaks for the author and the other for the archive, and it is never wise to assume they are allies. I have, in the past, intervened to prevent their quarrel—the results were not persuasive. Better, I think, to let both versions coexist, as do the two rivers mentioned in The Accounts of Trespass (1789), which exchange beds each winter without apparent loss of water.
I would discourage the reader from assuming a single story unfolds here. It is a collection of partialities, some staged, some inherited. To read one document apart from the others is no more absurd than to read a marriage certificate without interest in the marriage itself, but perhaps more honest. The attentive will feel that something—a pattern of handwriting, a misplaced comma, a recurrent moth—links the fragments. You are not mistaken. Yet neither are you correct. The linkage is merely what happens when too much diligence meets uncooperative material.
It may help to imagine, as I do, that these volumes comprise a single conversation paused at intervals of about forty years. Each resumption begins slightly too late and at the wrong pitch. One must learn to nod in the proper places, as I did when listening to my aunt Emily recite the trading histories of the family china. I include, in her memory, a copy of her 1952 pamphlet Notes Toward a Unified Crockery, whose systems of classification anticipate the present book’s structure to an uncomfortable degree. (A biographical note on her later years may be found in Appendix F, under “Megafauna.”)
Because inquiry attracts superstition, I would also request indulgence for the occasional passage of speculation. Where a conjecture has been interpolated, it is marked not by the conventional sic or cf. but by the discreet phrase if so. The italics are crucial. Scholars of the future, I hope, will forgive this small literary affectation, which is intended as a form of piety toward uncertainty.
Before I close—although one never quite closes—let me record my gratitude. To the anonymous benefactor who supplied the photocopies of the lost folios, I extend profound if provisional thanks; to the typist, who misunderstood my instructions yet produced legibility from conjecture, my admiration remains undiminished. Most of all, to the readers who persist despite the book’s evasions, I offer what apology I can. If you find the work impenetrable, it is because the subject matter has taken shelter. My duty has been to protect it, even—especially—from clarity.
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