The thing is about archives … they are the paydirt of history. Everything else is opinion. At a certain point you actually need documents. Germaine Greer, 20 February 2013

I am a product of 1990s academia, a reader of Judith Butler, a postmodernist and a queer. I could say a lot about my own views on gender, sex and sexuality, just as I could say a lot about Germaine Greer’s statements on trans people, and trans women in particular. I could spend time outlining why I think her views on the subject are wrong, offensive, intellectually misguided, perhaps dangerous. What is more, even if Greer fails to recognise the deep flaws in her thinking, I hope that her ideas in this space are rejected by the broader community and quickly found to be on the wrong side of history.

But we must also remember Greer’s views, like my own, cannot be separated from their context. They have been shaped by particular moments, people and places, just as the views Greer expressed shaped events and the opinions of others.

Which brings me to her archive. When it was announced Greer’s papers would go to the University of Melbourne, and a job for the Greer archivist was later advertised, I remember some comments flying around Twitter and elsewhere which – to put it more diplomatically than some did at the time – questioned whether the acquisition was advisable. After all, though  an influential and high profile figure, Greer has often been controversial, and remains so (as the last two weeks have shown). To some she is a feminist icon, to others a transphobe.

But as an archivist, researcher and historian all this controversy just reinforces the importance of archival evidence. Greer said in February 2013: “I could never destroy a single piece of paper, because each is a witness.” Apart from the scope and diversity of the collection and its value as social and intellectual history, if she truly kept everything, we can ask questions like: when did she first start writing about trans people? Can we see evidence she engaged with scientists or other thinkers on the subject? Have her views evolved over time? How did people react to this aspect of her work and how did these reactions change over time? Is there evidence of a growing backlash? Which activists and critics contacted her to argue against her views? What did they say? How were they received?

There is always a danger that archives reify as well as document. Countering this does not mean rejecting those whose ideas we partly or wholly dislike. What we preserve says something about who we think is significant, but we must not confuse this with the idea that the papers we save say anything about who we think is right. We need the papers of Tony Abbott as much as those of Gough Whitlam; the papers of South Africa’s apartheid government as much as those of Mandela; the papers of the KKK as much as those of the NAACP; and (at the risk of invoking Godwin’s law) the papers of the Nazi Party as much as those of Jewish émigrés or the French Resistance.

Understanding the changing attitudes toward LGBTIQA+ people and communities means preserving, documenting and providing access to some ugly and unpalatable stuff as much as supporting pride and the acceptance of diversity. We need the papers of Germaine Greer just as we need to support and maintain trans community archives and institutional collections. Similarly, I hope collectively we can preserve and provide access to the papers of Fred Nile, Family First and the Australian Christian Lobby, as well as Rodney Croome, the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras, and PFLAG Australia.

We need the evidence, of pride, strength, resilience and difference, and of hatred, misunderstanding, prejudice and disgust, and all the messy stuff in between; the evidence of what has been done to us as well as the evidence of what we have done. Everything else is opinion.

 

[The two quotes from Germaine Greer in this post are from her remarks at the opening of the Protest! Archives from the University of Melbourne exhibition, 20 February 2013: https://youtu.be/ppRX1XuCO8w]