writing_womans_lives_symposium_paper_book_v2

Because women are not typically remembered, the biographer who locates records of a woman
whose biography is later written undergoes a “discovery” experience. The encounter with the subject
produces a sudden recognition of the subject’s significance and the biographer’s gaze lifts the subject
out of obscurity and into history. The case of Big Liz was, that after looking my grandfather’s varied
life and wide degree of experiences, I was faced with the realisation that it was impossible to write
his biography without first addressing his mother – a strong influence upon her favourite son. He
had lived an active life in which meaning had been acted bodily and had been recorded both
publically and privately. The major’s life is more visible and is a masculine history. She, on the other
hand, is silent; only present is archives and family myth. She is the deserving subject of a microhistory
– one that favours the non‐elite people who do not appear in the public record as visibly as
others.
Frequent in feminist biography is the hallmark opening story explaining how the biographer
discovered her woman. Reinhartz describes these experiences as a special moment of feminist
biography, sometimes referred to as “magical moments”, which occur at a particular time and place
the biographer remembers and can recall. 7 This moment of discovery, though sustained, later
blends/transforms into a dialogue negotiating changing circumstances and introducing numerous
perspectives, which ultimately enrich the biography. This is what I must do to understand Elizabeth
Mary Ham. Writing biographies about women is inherently a form of protest. Reinharz defines the
act of writing women’s biography as recovering and giving voice to lost and marginalised peoples and
places. 8
My aim is to recover lost stories (Elizabeth Mary Ham’s), lost histories (Pratten, the location
where they ultimately settled), and lost or marginalised voices (displaced peoples – whether of
family or the Australian aboriginal people on whose land they settled). The idea that Big Liz shared
the physical and social condition of women in her society is necessary to maintain – insomuch as it
allows us to interpret the facts and events in women’s lives in new and different ways. Further, it
emphasises the radical choices and actions that she made in creating her life.
What female support systems did Liz have on the frontier, especially when she was acting beyond
the social norms of her time? Where does she fall in the dichotomy of Dammed whores and God’s
police? Is she or is she not a feminist? This is a difficult question considering her upbringing and
actions. Certainly she returned to the dominant social construct that she had fled – but one she had
constructed and blessed herself. With her return journey to London in 1908, she would have been
pleased at seeing the improvement in the social conditions that she enjoyed on the periphery – more
rights, the vote and recognition, while those she had left behind had either perished or those living
did not enjoy equal rights. She certainly rebelled against the marginal status allocated to women –
this constitutes a central theme to her life.
These are just some of the representations of Elizabeth Mary Ham; all of which go to making up
the many lives of this biographical subject. I hope that my biography will do her justice.
Keywords: Oral history, Micro‐history, Absence, Story, Local history
Geoff BELLIGOI
Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona,
Australian Studies Centre ‐ Universitat de Barcelona
Notes
1 Anne Summers “Damned Whores and God's Police: The Colonization of Women in Australia”
Penguin Books Ltd 25 August 1983 London
2
Hayden White, “The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality”, in On Narrative, ed.
W.J.T. Mitchell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981). pp. 44‐45
3
In Joseph Amato, The Extraordinary Ordinary and the Changing Face of Place. Historically
Speaking, Vol.14, Num. 1 Jan 2013 p. 3.
124