Pacific historian and anthropologist Professor Greg Dening (1931-2008) was a man of many silences. Trawling through the large Dening archive in the State Library of Victoria, I am struck by the silences, the gaps and the stories left untold. In one of Greg’s many metaphors, that of ‘encounters’, on the beaches and islands traversed by Islanders and Intruders, the silences in interrogating the encounters between Native and Stranger were compelling. In this presentation I reflect on the Dening archive as a lens through which we might seek glimpses of Dening’s historiographic mastery and the production of his compelling works. Yet I am also attentive to the politics of archival engagement, the need to interrogate the archive not as a ‘body of facts’ waiting to be discovered, but rather in terms of its gaps, its silences and indeterminacies. The Dening archive, voluminous yet enigmatic, invites an interrogation into the poetics of engagement with archive, truth, memory, and the challenges of writing biography.

Dr Michael Davis is an independent historian, writer and consultant. His research includes Indigenous/European histories of encounter, environmental and place-based histories, museums and ethnographic collecting, Indigenous rights, climate change, histories of anthropology, and biography. Michael’s publications include ‘River thinking: towards a holistic approach to watery places in the human imaginary’, in Voicing Rivers, Special Issue of River Research and Applications Journal, and (co-edited with Joni Adamson) Humanities for the Environment: Integrating Knowledges, Forging New Constellations of Practice (Routledge Earthscan, 2017).