Affect in the archive: trauma, grief, delight and texts. Some personal reflections

Historians, as users of archives, often discuss the thrill and emotion of their ‘discoveries’. We can form romantic attachments or be repulsed across the decades. Archives containing the physical remains of the past can transport us, we can move beyond the here and now. Before the Museum of Melbourne digitised Alfred Howitt’s correspondence, I once opened a letter written to him on classic nineteenth-century blued paper. As I pulled the missive from its envelope, I could smell tobacco smoke. I was immediately in the room with him. Recently, after completing an article on the topic of frontier violence, my coauthor and I both described a feeling of stress and trauma that came from reading colonial records of ‘skirmishes’ and ‘dispersals’. In this paper, I want to reflect on the experience of Affect in the archive.