Writing & Society Research Centre Seminar: David Walker on memoir and historical fact

In 2004 David Walker became ‘legally blind’. His new circumstances required a re-assessment of what he could do as a researcher and writer. Having been trained as an historian, he turned from formal archives which were now hard to read to the ‘archive between the ears’ to write Not Dark Yet: a personal history (Giramondo, 2011). The book explores the connections between family, regional and national histories and in the process reflects upon the limits and possibilities of memoir as history. In Not Dark Yet Walker sought to portray the largely undocumented lives of an ‘ordinary’ middle-class family, from its nineteenth-century origins in the town of Burra in northern South Australia, while opening perspectives on larger themes in Australian culture: enterprise, self-sufficiency, tolerance, curiosity and civic duty.