Sun 31 Aug: Taking stock of the Great Cory Fieldtrip, an enormous amount has been done.  Sue and I have finished mapping the very large Pringle papers and I have similarly completed the Mary Moffat letters while Andrea has mapped and checked the Bessie Price ones, so that only a relatively small amount of work on these remains to be done back in the UK before they can be delivered to our technical partners at HRI Sheffield. In addition, I have scoped Henderson and Shepherd letters and ME Pringle diaries and also jpeged letters ready to be mapped (by being added into a File Maker database), with these jointly involving the future work of Andrea and I over the next few months. All very satisfactory. But what comes to the surface, in a more taking stock and reflection sense? The following are on my mind:

• Silence as a key property of whiteness for some people in some times and places
• Excuses for not writing letters as a major element in writing letters
• The complexities of ‘Frontier women’ and the importance of place, the Post, the cosmopolitan
• Events and generations and how some people (some of them black, more of them white) were unable to see the politicization of ‘race’ happening under their noses
• The extreme partiality of what is extant, and also its representational qualities and its always complicated referentiality
• The importance of ‘the text’ despite or even because of its complicated character, and also the need to relate it to the context of its making and sending and reading

Other things will doubtless occur later, for taking stock has an incremental character.

Last updated: 31 August 2014