In Jimmy Governor’s archive

  • Katherine Biber
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/01576895.2014.961023
Keywords: Jimmy Governor, legal history, prison diary

Abstract

This article examines a selection of archival records created and preserved in relation to the Aboriginal outlaw Jimmy Governor. It focuses in particular upon a special diary kept by the officers guarding him during his time in the condemned cell at Darlinghurst Gaol in 1900–01. The article considers these records and the various microfilm and digital surrogates used by scholars in terms of the affordances of their specific materiality. It advances an argument about how these particular archival records function as evidence of law, duty and public administration. Whereas in the past Jimmy Governor’s story has primarily been told in the genre of law-breaking, this article argues that these archival records instead reveal him as an agent of law-making. When examined as pages and as paper, the various documents that comprise the Jimmy Governor archive provide evidence of a commitment to the rule of law in a colonial society on the brink of Federation.

Author Biography

Katherine Biber

Katherine Biber is a legal scholar, criminologist and historian in the Faculty of Law at the University of Technology Sydney, Australia. She is author of Captive Images: Race, Crime, Photography (Routledge-Cavendish, 2007), and co-editor of The Lindy Chamberlain Case: Nation, Law, Memory (Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2009, co-editors D. Staines and M. Arrow). Currently she is the sole Chief Investigator in the project “Open Justice and Open Secrets: The Cultural Afterlife of Criminal Evidence” (ARC Discovery grant, 2013–2015).

Published
2014-10-14
How to Cite
Biber K. (2014) “In Jimmy Governor’s archive”, Archives & Manuscripts, 42(3), pp. 270-281. doi: 10.1080/01576895.2014.961023.
Issue
Vol 42 No 3 (2014): Special Issue: Literary archives, materiality and the digital
Section
Articles

From 2022 (Volume 50) authors contributing to Archives & Manuscripts agree to publish their work under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way. Authors retain copyright of their work, with first publication rights granted to A&M.