Jack Maggs and the right to be forgotten: Reflections on ethics in the archives

Kim Shaw

They also record convicts’ complexions, tattoos, what they had in the bank and in some cases, which types of worm lived in their guts.

—Hamish Maxwell Stewart, ABC Conversations¹

Whatever it is called, it is a terrible thing, Sir, for a man to feel his insides all exposed to public view.

—Jack Maggs in Peter Carey, Jack Maggs

The title character of Peter Carey’s Jack Maggs (1997), a former convict who has broken the condition of his pardon by returning to England from exile in Australia, exhibits strong and visceral reactions to what he perceives as violations of both his person and personal history. Tobias Oates, who fashions himself as a man of letters and of science, persistently provokes Maggs’s sensibilities by affronting his claims to privacy and the right to manage the telling of his own story. When we bring this novel into the context of current discussions on data privacy, it can facilitate a re-examination of the ethical responsibilities of historians towards both the living and the dead. The drama that ensues Oates’s objectification of Maggs, ‘a blessed butterfly he has to pin down on his board’,² exemplifies many of the tensions at the core of current debates concerning the right to be forgotten (RTBF). These tensions will be considered alongside the evolving landscape of data privacy, as evidenced in the historical practice of providing public access to Tasmanian convict records and a more recent example of a Danish medical database that has been protected from all forms of access well into the future.

The repression of Tasmanian convict records in the 1960s has largely been viewed as a conservative and paternal attempt to protect the descendants of transportees from association with their convict origins. In contrast to the criticism this suppression incurred, there is now a growing global awareness of the need to legislate privacy rights for individuals and their personal data, both for their own protection as well as the protection of their descendants. While disliked by some historians, recent developments in individual privacy rights are generally viewed as progressive and necessary, though it should be noted that the practical application of these rights is complex and the formulation of legislation to support this continues to be reviewed and debated.³ Nevertheless, the novelised experience of Jack Maggs and the voice he lends to those who may be vulnerable to the misuse of personal data underscores why an investment in the RTBF is a pressing concern.

The absence of a convict ‘voice’ from the administrative records used to reconstruct the lives of those transported to Australia’s colonies has long posed an issue for historians and convict biographers. Matthew Cunneen and Malcolm Allbrook observe how an ‘element of imagination’ has proven an effective way to ‘impart an element of humanity to a field of investigation in which even elementary biographical details are often scarce’.⁴ They reference two accounts in historian Babette Smith’s A Cargo of Women (1988) as successful examples: one abiding ‘firmly by the written record’; the other a novelised version, aimed at bringing ‘the story of her ancestor, Susannah Watson, to a wider audience’.⁵ They further cite Melanie Nolan, Christine Fernon and Rebecca Kippen’s pertinent acknowledgement that ‘sometimes novelists research and … historians imagine’.⁶ Among the works of novelists whose fictional narratives ‘are nonetheless grounded in archival research’, Cunneen and Allbrook name some key examples including Marcus Clarke’s For the Term of his Natural Life (1875), Richard Flanagan’s Gould’s Book of Fish (2001) and Kate Grenville’s The Secret River (2005).⁷ Peter Carey’s Jack Maggs may also be added to this list.

A celebrated Australian author, Peter Carey has won numerous literary awards for his writing, recurrently exploring postcolonial themes of identity, history and memory. Much of the critical reception of Jack Maggs has focused on Carey’s rendering of nineteenth-century England and his interplay and subversion of Dickensian tropes.⁸ Responses to Jack Maggs have also centred on issues of identity and how personal histories can shape a character and cause them to challenge and question their sense of belonging.⁹ The theme of ownership is also foremost in this work, and connects with questions of identity, personal history and biography. As will be demonstrated, it is this focus that makes the protagonist, Jack Maggs, both a humanising voice for the individuals who are the subjects of Australia’s convict administration records and a powerful voice in the case for a right to be forgotten.

RTBF has been described as ‘a category of rights that permits a person to exercise some control over the information that third parties hold’ about them and the ‘ability of others to access such information’.¹⁰ Originating within the European Union (EU), RTBF affects the authority of individuals to control the public availability of data pertaining to themselves. At the time of writing, Australia is in the process of reviewing its Privacy Act 1988, with the Attorney-General’s Department releasing the Privacy Act Review Report 2022 on 16 February 2023. Among the proposed changes is the introduction of a right to erasure (Proposal 18.3), whereby ‘An individual may seek to exercise the right to erasure for any of their personal information’ and a discussion for the provision of a ‘right to be forgotten’ based on the example set by the EU.¹¹ Given the global nature of data dissemination, it is not surprising that similar formulations of rights pertaining to data protection have been a concern for many jurisdictions beyond the EU.¹² It is the RTBF, nevertheless, that has become the reference point for considerations of this issue and a touchstone for debate. The case that sparked initial discussions of the topic involved a 2010 request from a Spanish citizen to have personal information regarding the foreclosure of his home, 16 years prior, ‘removed from Google’s list of returns for online searches of his name’.¹³ Google made an appeal to the EU’s higher courts when the Spanish court ruled in the applicant’s favour. To the surprise of some, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) upheld the Spanish court’s ruling in its 2014 decision:

The CJEU’s ruling on RTBF held that citizens residing in all EU nations have the right, under certain conditions, to request that Internet search engine operators (ISEOs) remove links to some kinds of personal information about them.¹⁴

Further to this, the European Parliament made direct reference to RTBF in 2016 when it enacted the General Data Protection Regulation, referencing Article 17 as the ‘Right to erasure (‘right to be forgotten’)’.¹⁵

As Trevor Reed observes, the EU ‘faced considerable pressure from social media corporations, journalists, and historians’ concerned about the impact of RTBF legislation.¹⁶ Historians have been vocal objectors to the enacting of the RTBF, claiming that the potential loss of data available to them will equate to holes in the narrative of history.¹⁷ Kristie Byrum summarises these concerns from the perspective of community memory, noting that for

journalists and historians, the removal of information is particularly troubling as information becomes harder to find, or worse yet, history is ostensibly rewritten as the community memory is distorted by holes in the search engine results.¹⁸

While these claims are questionable, and will be questioned, it is argued that what is really at stake here is a shifting of power from those who have assumed ownership and forged careers from their interpretation of various sources of extant information to the individuals who themselves are the subject of such data. The attending anxieties of these shifting claims of ownership play out in Carey’s novel when Tobias Oates determines that his possession of the ‘Criminal Mind’ of Jack Maggs will provide the source material for his magnum opus.¹⁹

Tobias Oates, a fictionalised portrayal of the author Charles Dickens, is in the early phase of his career and has garnered a reputation for his humorous caricatures of recognisable social stereotypes and oddities, such as the oft-referenced Captain Crumley and Mrs Morefallen. Late in the novel, Oates defends the liberty he takes in satirising an old woman for the sake of his art, declaring: ‘To the Gods we are all comic figures.’²⁰ Maggs, ‘perceiving the unhappy fate before him’, for he is now well ensnared in Tobias’s web, insightfully responds: ‘As flies to wanton boys are we.’²¹ It will be a reckless and wingless version of Maggs’s history that Oates will sell.

The quality of outcomes aside, some may argue that Oates is simply claiming a right to free expression. In debates concerning RTBF legislation, a distinction is frequently drawn between a ‘right to forget’ and a ‘right to be forgotten’, most notably by those with objections to the latter. While acts of forgetting and remembering are accepted as ‘integral parts of the right to free expression’, RTBF, invariably described as ‘a radical variant of the right to privacy’, is often perceived as a threat to free expression:

the right to be forgotten carries an element of coercion: when successfully applied, its net result is that the person exercising it diminishes, if not censors, the right to information of others. If it does, it affects the right to free expression. It is thus important not to confuse the right to forget and the right to be forgotten.²²

In asserting his right to privacy, Jack Maggs is a literal and physical ‘element of coercion’. There are many instances where he does not hesitate to threaten violence on those who seek to invade his privacy or shop his secrets. Tobias Oates is his primary target, having been played on by the skills of Oates in the game of magnetism (a form of hypnotism) to publicly reveal his scarred and brutalised back and thus the secret of his convict history. Sitting opposite each other—in a coach on the way to meet the thief-taker who Maggs believes will locate Henry Phipps, his English ‘son’—Jack confronts Tobias:

‘Penny for my thoughts,’ said he. ‘That’s awful rich mate.’

Then, with no explanation he grabbed Toby’s head and held it hard …

‘How am I to get those thoughts back out?’

… ‘I did not know you cared so much for them, Jack Maggs. You never took the time to read the minutes of our meetings. But when we return to London I’ll give you the tin box and all my notes. And we will burn them together. Now kindly release me you are hurting my ear.’

Jack Maggs held him grimly. ‘Your notes are lies, mate. Your notes say nothing about me taking off my shirt. The truth is you have had me reveal secret information in my sleep.’

‘All your secrets will be returned to you. Please let me go.’

…

This Maggs answered by tightening his massive grip. ‘This is where my secrets are,’ he whispered. ‘Inside this box. The brain box. This is what we must break into.’²³

Maggs is anxious to reclaim control of his personal history and wishes to erase its traces from Tobias’s ‘brain box’. His fear is that this information will be misunderstood, misused and unfairly prejudice his position. In this, Maggs’s stance is not dissimilar to those who might argue for certain parts of their personal information and history to be deleted and erased from digital memory.

Maggs has a fraught relationship with his Australian history and refuses to identify with that ‘race of Australians’, insisting ‘I am an Englishman’.²⁴ The business success, recognition and wealth he achieved in his post-convict years in Australia hold little value for him other than as a means to enable his eventual return to England. Even the children he fathered there, while materially provided for, are overlooked and forgotten in his single-minded mission to reconnect with the only ‘son’ he wishes to recognise. He explains: ‘I made my promise to Henry before they were born.’²⁵ Jack’s promise to Henry, the boy who showed him a small kindness in a time of great need, is a focused devotion that would see him raised as the fine Englishman Jack himself longed to be. Providing for Henry’s education and comfortable life from afar enabled Jack to endure the brutality of convictism and to succeed beyond it. Comparisons with Magwitch and Pip are intentional in Carey’s reimagined and revised telling of Dickens’s Great Expectations (1861), but the intensity of Jack’s faith in Henry, and the ensuing disappointment it brings, also riffs on the relationship between the child Sylvia and the convict Rufus Dawes in Marcus Clarke’s For the Term of His Natural Life.²⁶ However, Jack’s belief in the redemptive powers of Henry’s compassion is misplaced in a way that Dawes’s investment in Sylvia is not. Back on English soil, Jack Maggs has compounded reasons to forget and erase his Australian ties. His life is literally in peril if his unauthorised return should be discovered.

Maggs’s nostalgia for England—‘Underneath the scalding sun, which burned his flesh as soon as it was mangled, Jack Maggs would imagine the long mellow light of English Summer’—is born from a dissociative response to the trauma he experiences as a convict in Australia.²⁷ The truth, however, is that his formative years were also often brutal while in the house of his adoptive mother, the aptly named Ma Britten. When a baby, he was delivered to her care in a place referred to as ‘Hell’s Doorway’.²⁸ It is difficult to know how the horrors beyond Hell’s Doorway compare to those of Hells Gates, the entrance point for the notorious Macquarie Harbour Penal Station, but for Jack, the former is an object of nostalgia. Martin Staniforth has observed how Marcus Clarke ‘established amnesia and false memory as central to settler Australians’ relationship to their history’.²⁹ By probing into the intricate nuances of Australians’ relationship with their convict past, these literary explorations provide insightful reflections that contribute significantly to a better understanding of Australians’ lived history. They show that forgetting is not a benign activity, but rather, as Beth Boehm argues, ‘amnesia is a pathological nostalgia, and it thus calls our attention to the pathology behind the cultural enterprise of “forgetting” Australia’s convict origins’.³⁰

The belief among earlier generations of Australians that convict ancestry was ‘a stain to be hidden’ has been well documented.³¹ As Lucy Frost explains, the

descendants of 150,000 men and women transported to New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land between 1788 and 1853 created alternative stories to explain their ancestors’ arrival, stories intended to conceal a ‘convict stain’.³²

Sometimes the subterfuge was laid by convicts choosing to make a fresh start, or it may have been a conscious choice enacted by their descendants. Either way, the program of forgetting was so successful, Babette Smith writes, that ‘by the early decades of the twentieth century the screen erected to protect families that were founded by convicts had become genuine amnesia’.³³ Before the 1960s, those interested in uncovering Australia’s convict history had limited access to penal records, ‘carefully guarded’ as they were.³⁴ By the mid-twentieth century, attitudes slowly started to change and now convict ancestry is largely seen as something to be embraced, even celebrated. Ronald Lambert, in his 1999 study of two convict-descendent societies, reports that most ‘respondents shared the belief that the stain was largely a preoccupation of the past or confined today to older generations’; he further suggests that for the current, younger generation ‘the convict stain’ may in fact be ‘a dead letter’.³⁵ In the evolving responses to Australia’s convict past, it is possible to observe some of the tensions inherent in the distinction between a ‘right to forget’ and a ‘right to be forgotten’ that have become a focus of contemporary discussions of rights to privacy. In the language of this debate, it might be said that previous generations asserted their ‘right to free expression’ through a program of ‘forgetting’ their convict past. The curious history of the Tasmanian convict records reveals how this ‘right to forget’ was, at times, institutionally supported by what might be interpreted as a ‘right to be forgotten’, enacted on behalf of those with convict ancestry.

Forgetting and remembering ‘are context-sensitive subjects and span across many domains, ranging from problems related to an individual RTBF to broader societal issues like the memory of a nation’.³⁶ The path from forgetting to remembering is not straight, and the detours taken can be illuminating, as Frost’s account of the history and guardianship of Tasmanian convict records tells:

On a governmental level, a willed amnesia that changed the name of Van Diemen’s Land to Tasmania helps to explain why the historical importance of convict records was ignored for a hundred years until a state archivist was appointed in 1951, and records not already destroyed were brought under state protection. Then in the 1960s, the convict records were closed to the general public, and academic researchers were forbidden to publish names from the documents.³⁷

The primary reason archivists were charged with ‘the role of community guards’ was to protect people from any public revelation of their convict ancestry. As a memorandum cited by Frost declares:

The Archives Officer and his staff will at all times be alert to prevent any misuse of the Records or any application of knowledge gained from them which may cause unnecessary embarrassment to members of the public.³⁸

This position was challenged in the 1960s and 1970s when historians Lloyd Robson and Peter Bolger applied to include the names of convicts in their respective publications. While Robson was denied, Bolger went ahead and included names without the explicit consent of the Tasmanian Library Board.³⁹ It was 1973 and, as Frost observes, ‘all forms of censorship in Australia were coming under attack from a populace tired of being “protected”’.⁴⁰ Along with public sentiment, technological innovations and, more specifically, microfilm made it possible for Bolger to bypass the need for the Library Board’s consent. As Bolger’s source notes explain:

The careers of convicts were also documented by officials of the Home Office in England and microfilm copies of these records are held in the collection of the National Library of Australia. In this book any information about careers owes its origin to the Home Office records and not to those of the Convict Department held in Hobart.⁴¹

The untenable position of Tasmanian Archive staff led to their presentation of a petition in 1976 advocating a policy change for reasons including the fact that staff

are continually being placed in the embarrassing and ludicrous situation whereby they must refuse to allow researchers to see these records even when most of the information in them is already known by, or otherwise available, to the researcher.⁴²

It was ‘apparent to the Archives staff that the public’s sensitivity towards convict records [had] diminished’.⁴³ After much debate, access to the convict records was granted to the public the following year. As Frost calculates, this was exactly 124 years ‘after the last convict ship docked in the harbour of Hobart town’.⁴⁴ While this suppression of convict records and the publication of identifying information has often been criticised as a backward step, it nonetheless anticipates some of the real concerns that current RTBF legislation attempts to address.

One hundred and twenty-four years might seem a long wait for some, but it may not be so remarkable when compared to a more recent case in Denmark that led to a change in the Danish Statute on Public Archives and sparked significant debate around the ‘issue of filing personal data in public archives’.⁴⁵ The case involves the Danish General Medical Database, implemented in 2007 with permission to store patient information regarding ‘specific kinds of illnesses’.⁴⁶ In 2014 it was discovered that the database contained additional data on a range of illnesses that had not been approved. Controversy ensued when, instead of simply deleting the unlawfully acquired data

the Keeper of the Public Records according to section 10(3) Danish Statute on Public Archives decided that a copy of the complete database had to be filed in the public archive as it had societal interest.⁴⁷

The public outrage attending this gained the attention of the government and parliament. An amendment to the Danish Statute on Public Archives was proposed:

In a legislative proposal it was contemplated as a new rule that unlawfully collected health data could be filed but would be blocked from any access for a period of 110 years after the commencement of blocking. After that period such health data would become accessible after a second period of 120 years unless the Keeper of the Public Records after consulting the Danish data protection agency … allows access for scientific purposes. If such health data was filed in an archive in 2015, this health data would become accessible in 2245.⁴⁸

Regarding the proposed blocking periods, Blume explains that the first one

took account of the historic/scientific interest as it made archiving possible. It laid primary emphasis on privacy and confidentiality … The second period of 120 years was not primarily based on the interest of the data subject … The second period was mainly founded upon a consideration to the surviving relatives of the data subjects.⁴⁹

Even though this proposal provided more than 100 years further protection and consideration for surviving relatives than the protection afforded the Tasmanian convict records

the majority in Parliament rejected the legislative proposal for two blocking periods amounting together to a total of 230 years because their protection did not go far enough as it did not stop filing in archives.⁵⁰

In the end, the government agreed on a new rule, specific to the database, prohibiting its contents from being filed in an archive.⁵¹

While public access to historical convict records detailing personal information of people who are deceased may not provoke the same alarm as the dissemination of contemporary health data of living individuals, it bodes well to remember that there was a time when it did. In what might be considered a prompt to enact a ‘right to be forgotten’, ‘discussion about whether the convict records of New South Wales should be destroyed’ occurred in 1901 with the Federation of Australia.⁵² Less formal attempts are rumoured to have occurred some 20 years prior:

when the Garden Palace exhibition centre burned down in a spectacular blaze, wild rumours swept Sydney that the fire had been started deliberately to destroy the records … Certainly, by the time the government wondered what to do with them, the specific records of the Superintendent of Convicts department had vanished … They were numerous and their destruction would have required quite a bonfire.⁵³

Sometimes, unwanted records were destroyed by individuals or by others acting on their behalf.⁵⁴ As Smith recounts, in Tasmania, ‘where convict records survived mass destruction, the records of some prominent citizens, such as John Davies, ex-convict editor of the Hobart Mercury, conveniently vanished’.⁵⁵ All of these anecdotes highlight concerns about convict records and their potential to negatively impact both former convicts and their surviving relatives. The historical actions taken to both protect and destroy these documents suggest that similar concerns existed—around preserving their ‘historic/scientific interest’ and the problems of reconciling this with issues of ‘privacy and confidentiality’—as those debated in relation to the health data stored in the Danish General Medical Database.

The convict stain may be an echo of the past, yet some current research directions have the potential to re-inflict a sense of shame and attending prejudice for those with convict ancestry. Advances in technology and data linkage have enabled the capacity for extensive life course and intergenerational analysis of convict populations and their descendants.⁵⁶ In a paper detailing the ‘potential forensic significance’ of the Tasmanian convict archives, the suggestion is made that ‘this large and complex collection of registers and associated papers’ might serve ‘as a starting point for an investigation of the health status and sociological characteristics of a migrant population and their descendants over many generations’.⁵⁷ Those behind the current curation of the Tasmanian Historical Dataset (a longitudinal data resource) have also noted how the ‘abundance of civil registration data in Tasmania enable, not only the tracing of convict and assisted migrant cohorts to death, but also the identification of their Tasmanian-born children and grandchildren’.⁵⁸ Among the noted areas of research that the Tasmanian Historical Dataset might facilitate is the study of health outcomes and their genetic and environmental determinants.⁵⁹ Without an ethical framework for pursuing such research, or discussion of how issues of privacy might be addressed, casual statements, such as the following, signal a potential for the perpetuation of a new wave of bias and prejudice towards this population and their descendants:

As with the intergenerational transmission of health inequalities, there are multiple mechanisms that might explain the perpetuation of prosecution histories across generations. These include poor parenting, poverty of expectation and opportunity and the genetic transmission of conditions likely to heighten the risk of arrest (for example, schizophrenia).⁶⁰

It should not need to be pointed out that schizophrenia is a complex diagnosis, and the majority of people who have experienced schizophrenia are never at risk of arrest. This is just one example of an offensive stereotype that has potential to be perpetuated if adequate qualification for such claims, and the protection of those it pertains to, are not provided. While sensitivities to inequalities in health research are growing along with greater recognition of the need to ‘decolonise research practices’,⁶¹ there appears to be no vocal concern over these proposed applications of Tasmanian records and what might be considered by some as the colonisation of their data by self-invested academics. While willing collaboration and shared ownership of outcomes among researchers and their subjects may be the ideal, this is not possible when the subjects under study are deceased. What is alarming is how incrementally close to ‘the surviving relatives of the data subjects’ these longitudinal data stretch, being now many generations beyond the original convict cohort. It is hard to see how this line of research might avoid the reinforcing of negative stereotypes and the re-inflicting of a convict stain on any number of currently disadvantaged Tasmanians whose ancestors’ lives were not afforded the aspects of privacy that might be demanded today.

In her introduction to a special issue on ‘Digital Methods, Empire Histories’ for the Journal of World History, Antoinette Burton remains sceptical that the application of new digital methods will facilitate the decolonisation of imperial and world histories. She cautions that the ‘digital’ can become a tool of imperialism

if we are not careful about how we frame our work and as importantly, if we are not vigilant about the imperial and imperializing histories still at work in many of the frames.⁶²

Interestingly, some of the curators of the Tasmanian Historical Dataset have also authored a paper for this special issue where they echo some of Burton’s concerns, noting the need ‘to both represent the complexity of source materials and to ensure that data [are] ethically organized’ so that the ‘prejudices of the past’ are not ‘inserted into the finding aids of the present’.⁶³ At the same time, they reiterate an interest in establishing the ‘pathways’ that ‘explain the transmission’ of intergenerational disadvantage and prosecution risk through their use of linked data.⁶⁴ However, as Burton observes:

Inevitably perhaps, today’s digital imperial ‘data’ are actually, more accurately, digitally transformed imperial sources. And for colonial subjects, as for the enslaved, data [have] more often than not meant terror at the scene of the crime.⁶⁵

This is certainly true for the fictional Jack Maggs.

There is a scene, in Carey’s novel, where Jack Maggs is confronted with his own convict record. The round of reactions provoked in Maggs reveal both his indignation that anyone should intrude on affairs he considers his own, and a sense of shame and defeat when he realises his private matter is in fact a public one he cannot reclaim. When Mr Buckle, the master of the house where Maggs has assumed the position of a footman, informs him that his lawyer, Mr Makepeace, ‘has made himself well acquainted with the Law as it pertains’ to his situation, Maggs is quick to respond: ‘My situation is my own damn business.’⁶⁶ However, as soon as Jack realises that Buckle is in possession of the ‘hefty volume’ that contains the details of his sentencing, his demeanour changes notably:

‘I’m a vermin, ain’t I?’ he nodded towards the book.

‘A vermin?’

He stood up from the table, his jaw a little slack, his eyes dull. ‘Don’t it say so?’

‘No it does not’

‘I am a cockroach, isn’t that so? ... I was transported for the term of my natural life. Weren’t those the words? Did not his Lordship wish to crush me with his heel?’⁶⁷

Buckle, who, at this point, has some compassion for Jack replies: ‘There are no cockroaches here.’ Buckle continues:

But it does say that one Jack Maggs received a conditional pardon in Morton Bay in 1820. And we have concluded that if only you were to remove yourself again to New South Wales you would be, to all purposes … well, no one would wish to hang you.⁶⁸

Conceding to Buckle, Jack lays out his predicament:

I know. God damn. I do know, Sir. But you see, I am a fucking Englishman, and I have English things to settle. I am not to live my life with all that vermin. I am here in London where I belong.⁶⁹

Jack clearly feels the stain of convictism and the lowly status with which he believes it is regarded and thus regards it himself. His identity is founded on distinguishing himself from the ‘vermin’ but the official records detailing his transportation effectively crush his fortitude: ‘It was heart-wrenching to witness the effect this announcement had upon this manly man. His shoulders slumped. He shook his great head slowly.’⁷⁰ Jack feels the weight of judgement his convict record carries, not only in a legal sense, but also, most keenly, in the negative associations and prejudice it carries in its wake. While Jack may be imagining this bias on behalf of Buckle, who is only interested in the legal details of Jack’s situation, the discrimination he experiences at the hands of Oates is real and dangerous.

In contrast to Buckle, Oates never concedes Jack’s humanity. For Oates, Maggs is a depraved curiosity to be plundered for self-advancement:

What a puzzle of life exists in the dark little lane-ways of this wretch’s soul, what stolen gold lies hidden in the vaults beneath his filthy streets … It’s the Criminal Mind … awaiting its first cartographer.⁷¹

Oates believes that Maggs is somehow an aberration, and that naming the features and traits distinguishing him from his fellow humans will ultimately reveal the archetype of the ‘Criminal Mind’. He repeatedly fails to apprehend the true character and circumstances of the man whose essence he relentlessly pursues. Jack is keenly aware of Oates’s failing:

You understand nothing … You can hoodwink me into taking off my shirt, but you don’t know a rat’s fart about me … You steal my fluid but you can’t imagine who I am, you little fribble.⁷²

Indeed, the tables turn hard on Oates who is ultimately revealed as the real thief with a stunningly criminal mind.

Under the pretext of curing the painful attacks of palsy that periodically afflict Maggs, Oates transforms the footman into a ‘Somnambulist’, for the amusement and admiration of Mr Buckle’s dinner guests.⁷³ This first encounter with Oates leaves Jack feeling ‘burgled’ and ‘plundered’.⁷⁴ Oates continually neglects the consequences and obligation that attend the considerable power of the manipulative art he practices and invariably dismisses as a ‘prank’.⁷⁵ He is severely rebuked by his family doctor when it is discovered that he is responsible for the death of one of Mr Buckle’s other servants:

‘What would the judge say, upon hearing that you had convinced the deceased that you were a surgeon?’

‘It was a prank, a joke.’

‘Mr Oates, the old fellow is dead.’

‘But not of my prank.’

…

‘I will write pneumonia on his death certificate, but if you really want my true opinion, it is that you bewitched him.’⁷⁶

This is only one of several unintended deaths that occur due to the selfish and careless actions of Oates. Oates is driven by his desire for recognition and power, ‘each day in the Morning Chronicle, each fortnight in the Observer, it was Tobias Oates who “made” the City of London … he named it, mapped it’.⁷⁷ Having come so far, until ‘his fun and games had killed a man’, Tobias blames some ‘trick of Fate’ that has made him ‘suddenly the criminal’, rather than the obvious lack of principled conduct he exhibits towards others.⁷⁸ His approach is to manipulate and master. The correlation of power and responsibility, unheeded by Tobias Oates in his search to uncover the mechanisms of the ‘Criminal Mind’, is one that should not be ignored by contemporary researchers looking to uncover the ‘mechanisms that might explain the perpetuation of prosecution histories’, for here, it can be supposed, there are more than just fictional lives at stake.

According to Blume, the example provided by the Danish General Medical Database, described above,

highlights a general problem that is connected to the general nature of the digital world, including the notion of a ‘right to be forgotten’. There are risks that indicate that this world can become a mystery for future generations with an interest in how digitization was in the beginning. Important information may be lost forever … privacy interest does not carry such strength that it ought to result in essential aspects of our society ending up in a black hole making future general interest and historic research into a kind of archaeological enquiry guessing its way through the mists of history.⁷⁹

Given the current amount of information and data available regarding our day-to-day lives and their operations—not least in the form of articles like Blume’s, ensuring future generations should not need to guess anywhere near the extent he describes—this concern does seem overstated. However, fears of the impact of a general acceptance of the right to be forgotten have been widely declared, claiming it ‘would lead to the rewriting of history in ways that impoverish our insights not only into anecdotal lives … but also into the larger patterns and trends of history’.⁸⁰ Forgetting the truth of historical acts in claims of free expression is rarely, if ever, a good thing, but claiming a right to be forgotten on the grounds of privacy speaks a legitimacy that warrants consideration. It is not so much about forgetting, rather it is about who has the authority and right to access and manage the remembering.

RTBF and the right to truth need not be seen as conflicting, as recognised in EU law. The maximisation principle, which underpins this understanding, allows these rights to coexist. This approach acknowledges that both privacy and cultural rights are not absolute but should be maximised on a case-by-case basis, extending beyond immediate parties to encompass broader interests.⁸¹ Archival science, which governs the organisation of identity and memory, plays a crucial role in maintaining this balance.⁸² As Trish Luker observes in an article exploring Indigenous challenges to record keeping, provision of

access to records, without an engagement with questions of ownership, repatriation and control, operates through a logic of incorporation, which risks the continued prioritisation of the narrative of settler colonial conquest and belonging.⁸³

Livia Iacovino advocates for a participatory approach that takes account of changing circumstances and enables a ‘shift in power to the record subject or group facilitated by technology and changing social conventions and law’.⁸⁴ This approach challenges traditional models by emphasising cultural rights, re-evaluating records management and promoting equitable representation of historical narratives.⁸⁵ Ownership, as Laura Savu observes, is a widely explored theme in Jack Maggs—‘the ownership of property, of one’s past, and, implicitly, of one’s identity’.⁸⁶ Ownership, it might also be argued, is the real issue at play in concerns over the implementation of an RTBF. Fears over the loss of data are really concerns over the loss of control and ownership of information that could previously be assumed. It might be said that those, like Oates, who are accustomed to the freedom of ‘plundering’ and colonising the details of other people’s lives are beginning to feel uncomfortable now that some control is being granted to the individual subjects concerned.

Overstated concerns about the impact of RTBF appear to disregard the fact that archives have always contained telling, mundane and profound silences and that these are also traces of history. As Max Picard observed: ‘Silence is as much a part of history as noise; the invisible as much a part of history as the visible.’⁸⁷ Silence in the archives is not a new phenomenon. Kathryn Hunter acknowledges feminist historian Judith Allen as ‘an early proponent of the view that political power entails control of archives and, hence, of cultural memory’.⁸⁸ Arguing against a positivist approach to history that claims the only knowledge we can possess of the past is that for which present evidence and artefacts exist:

Allen argued that a feminist historian would not—indeed could not—conclude from the lack of nineteenth century records about rape and wife-battering that such women had less to fear from their menfolk than women in the late twentieth century.⁸⁹

As Hunter observes, Allen determined that the ‘axiomatically phallocentric nature of professional history … was buttressed by the discursive power of records and archives: non-mention was not simply invisibility but erasure’.⁹⁰ Silence may inform a history of power and repression or it may allude to elusive actors who have ‘chosen to be silent in the records’ and ‘to participate in the trappings of modernity on their own terms’, as Hunter discovered by way of a lack of ‘empirical evidence’ when researching Aboriginal women who performed in travelling shows throughout the first half of the twentieth century.⁹¹ As Mark C. Taylor reflects, the ‘longer one ponders the multiple dimensions of silence, the richer its resonances become’.⁹²

Jack Maggs, with his ‘private eyes’,⁹³ would like to choose the path of silence and ‘participate in the trappings of modernity’ on his ‘own terms’. Instead, he is forced to contend with the power of Tobias Oates who compels him to speak and reveal his secrets. Like those who unlawfully stored information in the Danish General Medical Database without appropriate consent or authority, Oates betrays the access Maggs has agreed to provide to the demons that live in his ‘Mesmeric Fluid’. These demons are a ruse on the part of Oates who tries to convince Maggs they are responsible for the painful facial spasms he experiences. Oates’s true intention is to extract personal information from Maggs while holding him in a hypnotic state. He is aware that Maggs would not willingly divulge details of his personal history and would not be pleased to find they had been stolen from him. Oates fabricates ‘transcriptions’ of his supposed battle with Jack’s demons to disguise his true purpose: ‘There were, as in all crooked businesses, two sets of books, and had Jack Maggs seen the second set he might have recognized scenes (or fragments) more familiar to him.’⁹⁴ This deception and abuse of Jack’s vulnerable position plays out in a setting that underscores Tobias’s total disregard for any claim to privacy Jack may have. Maggs is disconcerted to discover the audience of friends and family Oates has invited to witness his magnetism session: ‘Are all of them to spy on me?’⁹⁵ Speaking of the bargain he has made with Oates, who has promised an ‘introduction to the Thief-taker’ (who will prove to be another of Tobias’s deceptions) in exchange for his agreement to submit to the magnetism, Maggs insists, but to no avail, ‘It was never to be in public’.⁹⁶ While Oates attempts to convince Maggs that the assembled audience ‘is not public’, his reassurances are disingenuous, as he will later invite a friend to secretly view a session with Maggs.⁹⁷

Maggs is clearly sensitive to any public exposure of what he deems to be personal and private. Seeking an explanation from Oates as to how he had been induced to speak against his will, Jack is informed that he was made a ‘Somnambulist’, to which he replies: ‘Whatever it is called, it is a terrible thing, Sir, for a man to feel his insides all exposed to public view.’⁹⁸ The fictional liberties Oates assumes in exposing Jack’s ‘insides’ resonate with the scrutiny to which authorities subjected the real bodies of convicts transported to Australia. As those who mine these archival resources are quick to share, these extant records include such details as ‘the species of worm that infected a convict’s gut, the signs of scurvy that erupted on their limbs and swelled their gums, and the state of their pulse’.⁹⁹ The invasive nature of these details and the assault on the integrity and privacy of the people these records represent, is something that is rarely considered in contemporary research and the writing of convict biographies. Nonetheless, the visceral reactions of Jack Maggs give us pause to consider the ethical implications of the ways in which we engage with such personal, yet public, information.

The idea that transported convicts wanted to be remembered is one that has been argued with reference to the popular keepsakes and tattoos they frequently exchanged or wore. Love tokens, fashioned from repurposed coins, or tattoos, incorporating the common phrases ‘When this you see, remember me’ and ‘Forget me not’, are key examples.¹⁰⁰ Paul Donnelly writes of ‘the desire to remember, and the need to be remembered’, and notes how the production of convict tokens were ‘designed to perpetuate memory’:

It is the emotional motivation of their manufacture; the need to remember and memorialise, which gives the objects human resonance and enables them to ‘speak’ collectively from out of their disparate pasts.¹⁰¹

While, for some, this might be viewed as lending credence to the public sharing of the details of many convict lives, it could also be argued that the ‘remembering’ invited through these items was likely often deeply personal and for a select and private audience. Carey’s protagonist, Jack Maggs, also has an intense desire to be remembered and understood, but not by just anyone nor by any form of public. It is for Henry Phipps only that he wishes to be memorialised and he goes to great lengths to ensure that the correspondence, in which he allows himself to be seen, is kept secret from all others.

Employing a method that might be likened to an early form of data encryption, Maggs spends all of the available time he has composing a detailed account of his life in the hope of securing Henry’s empathy, trust and, ultimately, love:

Look, Henry, whether you like the sight or no, read these words and imagine what it was to have, not your life, surrounded by a ring of golden chairs, but mine.¹⁰²

Jack’s own story contrasts sharply with the sensational one that Oates is brewing, in which Maggs is an aberration at the mercy of his criminal mind. Jack’s story, as he tells it, reveals a man of integrity, despite the hard life he has endured. This opinion is confirmed by comments from a fellow member of the household staff:

There is a certain aspect to his manner which does betray his past, and yet you would not know the tortures he has passed through if you did not witness the scars … He has been flogged, Sir. Yet for a man so abused, I think you will find him of a very decent disposition.¹⁰³

Jack encrypts the document of his life by writing in a backward hand with invisible ink that will require the juice of lemons and a mirror to decipher. His intention, for Henry’s eyes only, is to ‘put my life before you all at once, to make you privy to information that could, in the wrong hands, have me dancing the Newgate Jig’.¹⁰⁴

Though personal claims to an RTBF are not a feature of the historical period in which Carey’s novel is set, nor was it a formal topic of discussion at the time Carey was writing, the character of Jack Maggs, nonetheless, presents a compelling case for the consideration of issues pertaining to the rights of privacy and the ethical use of personal information that falls into the public domain. Maggs invites us to witness the brutality, not of his life as a convict, but of the invasion of privacy he encounters at the behest of Oates. Oates exposes Jack’s convict past and then seeks to control Jack’s narrative for his own benefit. However, details of Jack’s convict life were already available, as Buckle demonstrates by gaining access to his records. The official record of Maggs’s conviction conveys an aspect of his life over which he has no control regarding both access and the information conveyed. What Jack fears most is the way this information will be received and interpreted. While Maggs is, of course, a fictional character, his predicament is one that is shared among actual convicts. As Janet McCalman writes:

Convict lives pose a unique conundrum. In spite of all their variety they share a common experience of having been, at least for a time, consigned to what was called ‘the other side’, the place of the untrusted and unwanted. Their identity was spoiled. After sentence, some were never able to leave that dark place; those that did manage to return to society had to conceal their past, control their memories, and lie for the rest of their lives.¹⁰⁵

The lessons of Jack Maggs are pertinent to the present, and particularly to the ethics of researching convict lives and their descendants. While some may argue that the RTBF is a radical right to privacy and a step too far, the story of Jack Maggs highlights the need for some forms of protection for vulnerable individuals against potential bad actors like Tobias Oates. Jack is well aware of the vulnerability his exposure carries and attempts to implement his own version of a right to be forgotten, instructing Henry Phipps to ‘BURN EVERYTHING when it is read. Many of the events I tell you are from a long time ago, but I fear they may still be used against me by my Enemies’.¹⁰⁶

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1. 1 Hamish Maxwell Stewart, ‘Terrible Treasure: 75 000 Convict Stories Housed in a Hobart Basement’, interview with Richard Fidler, ABC Conversations, 19 June 2017, abc.net.au/radio/programs/conversations/conversations-hamish-maxwell-stewart/8611554.

2. 2 Peter Carey, Jack Maggs (Penguin Random House Australia, [1997] 2020), 60.

3. 3 For example, see: Hovsep Kocharyan, Lusine Vardanyan, Ondrej Hamuľák and Tanel Kerikmäe, ‘Critical Views on the Right to Be Forgotten after the Entry into Force of the GDPR: Is It Able to Effectively Ensure Our Privacy?’ International and Comparative Law Review 21, no. 2 (2021): 96–115, doi.org/10.2478/iclr-2021-0015.

4. 4 Matthew Cunneen and Malcolm Allbrook, ‘Understanding Convict Lives: A Historiographical and Methodological Reassessment’, Australian Journal of Biography and History, no. 7 (2023): 4, 5, doi.org/10.22459/AJBH.07.2023.01.

5. 5 Cunneen and Allbrook, ‘Understanding Convict Lives’, 4.

6. 6 Cunneen and Allbrook, ‘Understanding Convict Lives’, 4.

7. 7 Cunneen and Allbrook, ‘Understanding Convict Lives’, 3.

8. 8 See, for example: Sigrun Meining, ‘An Australian Convict in the Great English City: Peter Carey’s Jack Maggs’, Southerly 60, no. 3 (2000): 57–65; C. Kenneth Pellow, ‘Peter Carey’s Jack Maggs: Re-doing Dickens’s Re-doings of Dickens’, Papers on Language and Literature 49, no. 1 (2013): 86–108; Beverly Taylor, ‘Discovering New Pasts: Victorian Legacies in the Postcolonial Worlds of Jack Maggs and Mister Pip’, Victorian Studies 52, no. 1 (2009): 95–105, doi.org/10.2979/vic.2009.52.1.95.

9. 9 See, for example: Brandi Estey-Burtt, ‘“Ripped and Tortured Skin”: Mapping the Body in Peter Carey’s Jack Maggs’, ariel: A Review of International English Literature 50, no. 2–3 (2019): 191–217, doi.org/10.1353/ari.2019.0019; Anthony J. Hassall, ‘A Tale of Two Countries: Jack Maggs and Peter Carey’s Fiction’, Australian Literary Studies 18, no. 2 (1997): 128–36, doi.org/10.20314/als.ef67f2bd42; Elizabeth Ho, ‘Peter Carey’s Jack Maggs and the Trauma of Convictism’, Antipodes 17, no. 2 (2003): 124–32.

10. 10 Florent Thouvenin, Peter Hettich, Herbert Burkert and Urs Gasser, Remembering and Forgetting in the Digital Age (Springer, 2018), 16, doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90230-2.

11. 11 Australian Government, Attorney-General’s Department, Privacy Act Review Report 2022 (Commonwealth of Australia, 2022), 177.

12. 12 David Erdos, ‘The “Right to Be Forgotten” beyond the EU: An Analysis of Wider G20 Regulatory Action and Potential Next Steps’, Journal of Media Law 13, no. 1 (2021): 1–35, doi.org/10.1080/17577632.2021.1884947.

13. 13 Herman T. Tavani, ‘Should We Have a Right to Be Forgotten? A Critique of Key Arguments Underlying This Question’, Journal of Information Ethics 27, no. 2 (2018): 27.

14. 14 Tavani, ‘Should We Have a Right to Be Forgotten?’, 27.

15. 15 Thouvenin et al., Remembering and Forgetting, 49.

16. 16 Trevor Reed, ‘Indigenous Dignity and the Right to Be Forgotten’, Brigham Young University Law Review 46, no. 4 (2021): 1139.

17. 17 Antoon De Baets, ‘A Historian’s View on the Right to Be Forgotten’, International Review of Law, Computers & Technology 30, no. 1–2 (2016): 57–66, doi.org/10.1080/13600869.2015.1125155.

18. 18 Kristie Byrum, ‘Imperilling Community Memory: The European Right to be Forgotten’s Tampering of Search Engine Results’, in The Handbook of Communication Rights, Law, and Ethics: Seeking Universality, Equality, Freedom and Dignity, ed. Loreto Corredoira, Ignacio Bel Mallén and Rodrigo Cetina Presuel (John Wiley & Sons, 2021), 185, doi.org/10.1002/9781119719564.ch15.

19. 19 Carey, Jack Maggs, 253.

20. 20 Carey, Jack Maggs, 322.

21. 21 Carey, Jack Maggs, 321–2.

22. 22 De Baets, ‘A Historian’s View’, 58.

23. 23 Carey, Jack Maggs, 328–9 (original emphasis).

24. 24 Carey, Jack Maggs, 441.

25. 25 Carey, Jack Maggs, 441.

26. 26 Marcus Clarke, For the Term of His Natural Life (Victoria Publishing, [1875] 2000).

27. 27 Carey, Jack Maggs, 453.

28. 28 Carey, Jack Maggs, 109.

29. 29 Martin Staniforth, ‘“Shades of the Prison House”: Reading Richard Flanagan’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North and Peter Carey’s Amnesia’, Journal of Postcolonial Writing 53, no. 5 (2017): 579, doi.org/10.1080/17449855.2017.1326061.

30. 30 Beth A. Boehm, ‘Nostalgia to Amnesia: Charles Dickens, Marcus Clarke and Narratives of Australia’s Convict Origins’, Victorian Newsletter 109 (2006): 13.

31. 31 Robert Hughes, The Fatal Shore: The Epic of Australia’s Founding (Alfred A. Knopf, 1987), 158.

32. 32 Lucy Frost, ‘The Politics of Writing Convict Lives: Academic Research, State Archives and Family History’, Life Writing 8, no. 1 (2011): 19, doi.org/10.1080/14484528.2011.542327.

33. 33 Babette Smith, Australia’s Birthstain: The Startling Legacy of the Convict Era (Allen and Unwin, 2008), xii.

34. 34 Smith, Australia’s Birthstain, 48.

35. 35 Ronald D. Lambert, ‘Reclaiming the Ancestral Past: Narrative, Rhetoric and the “Convict Stain”’, Journal of Sociology 38, no. 2 (2002): 115, 125, doi.org/10.1177/144078302128756534.

36. 36 Thouvenin et al., Remembering and Forgetting, 7.

37. 37 Frost, ‘The Politics of Writing Convict Lives’, 19.

38. 38 Frost, ‘The Politics of Writing Convict Lives’, 24.

39. 39 Frost, ‘The Politics of Writing Convict Lives’, 24–5.

40. 40 Frost, ‘The Politics of Writing Convict Lives’, 25.

41. 41 Cited by Frost, ‘The Politics of Writing Convict Lives’, 25.

42. 42 Cited by Frost, ‘The Politics of Writing Convict Lives’, 25.

43. 43 Cited by Frost, ‘The Politics of Writing Convict Lives’, 25.

44. 44 Frost, ‘The Politics of Writing Convict Lives’, 25–6.

45. 45 Peter Blume, ‘Personal Data in Archives: A Danish Masterclass on the Complexity of Privacy in a Digital World’, Computer Law Review International 16, no. 4 (2015): 108, doi.org/10.9785/cri-2015-0404.

46. 46 Blume, ‘Personal Data in Archives’, 108.

47. 47 Blume, ‘Personal Data in Archives’, 108.

48. 48 Blume, ‘Personal Data in Archives’, 109.

49. 49 Blume, ‘Personal Data in Archives’, 109.

50. 50 Blume, ‘Personal Data in Archives’, 109.

51. 51 Blume, ‘Personal Data in Archives’, 109.

52. 52 Smith, Australia’s Birthstain, 50.

53. 53 Smith, Australia’s Birthstain, 50–1.

54. 54 Smith, Australia’s Birthstain, 51.

55. 55 Smith, Australia’s Birthstain, 51.

56. 56 Trudy Cowley, Lucy Frost, Kris Inwood, Rebecca Kippen, Hamish Maxwell-Stewart, Monika Schwarz, John Shepherd, Richard Tuffin, Mark Williams, John Wilson and Paul Wilson, ‘Reconstructing a Longitudinal Dataset for Tasmania’, Historical Life Course Studies 11 (2021): 20–47, doi.org/10.51964/hlcs10912.

57. 57 Roger W. Byard and Hamish Maxwell Stewart, ‘The Potential Forensic Significance of Convict Archives from Van Diemen’s Land, 1820–1877’, Forensic Science, Medicine and Pathology 14 (2018): 127, doi.org/10.1007/s12024-017-9913-2.

58. 58 Cowley et al., ‘Reconstructing a Longitudinal Dataset’, 35.

59. 59 Cowley et al., ‘Reconstructing a Longitudinal Dataset’, 34–5.

60. 60 Cowley et al., ‘Reconstructing a Longitudinal Dataset’, 35.

61. 61 Adrian Harper and Bridget Pratt, ‘Combatting Neo-colonialism in Health Research: What Can Aboriginal Health Research Ethics and Global Health Research Ethics Teach Each Other?’ Journal of Empirical Research on Human Research Ethics 17, no. 4 (2022): 433, doi.org/10.1177/15562646211058253.

62. 62 Antoinette Burton, ‘Digital Methods + Empire Histories = New, Old, and Emerging Practices’, Journal of World History 32, no. 2 (2021): 192, doi.org/10.1353/jwh.2021.0020.

63. 63 Barry Godfrey, Caroline Homer, Kris Inwood, Hamish Maxwell-Stewart, Rebecca Reed* and Richard Tuffin, ‘Crime, Penal Transportation, and Digital Methodologies’, Journal of World History 32, no. 2 (2021): 243, doi.org/10.1353/jwh.2021.0023 (*correct spelling should be ‘Read’ not ‘Reed’ as published).

64. 64 Godfrey et al., ‘Crime’, 245.

65. 65 Burton, ‘Digital Methods’, 192.

66. 66 Carey, Jack Maggs, 178.

67. 67 Carey, Jack Maggs, 179.

68. 68 Carey, Jack Maggs, 179.

69. 69 Carey, Jack Maggs, 179 (original emphasis).

70. 70 Carey, Jack Maggs, 178.

71. 71 Carey, Jack Maggs, 126.

72. 72 Carey, Jack Maggs, 357.

73. 73 Carey, Jack Maggs, 65.

74. 74 Carey, Jack Maggs, 44.

75. 75 Carey, Jack Maggs, 255.

76. 76 Carey, Jack Maggs, 255.

77. 77 Carey, Jack Maggs, 259–60.

78. 78 Carey, Jack Maggs, 260.

79. 79 Blume, ‘Personal Data in Archives’, 110.

80. 80 De Baets, ‘A Historian’s View’, 64.

81. 81 Livia Iacovino, ‘Shaping and Reshaping Cultural Identity and Memory: Maximising Human Rights through a Participatory Archive’, Archives and Manuscripts 43, no. 1 (2015): 34, doi.org/10.1080/01576895.2014.961491.

82. 82 Iacovino, ‘Shaping and Reshaping’, 38.

83. 83 Trish Luker, ‘Decolonising Archives: Indigenous Challenges to Record Keeping in “Reconciling” Settler Colonial States’, in Archives and New Modes of Feminist Research, ed. Maryanne Dever (Routledge, 2020), 122, doi.org/10.4324/9780429442032-8.

84. 84 Iacovino, ‘Shaping and Reshaping’, 38.

85. 85 Iacovino, ‘Shaping and Reshaping’, 38.

86. 86 Laura E. Savu, ‘The ‘Crooked Business’ of Storytelling: Authorship and Cultural Revisionism in Peter Carey’s Jack Maggs’, ariel: A Review of International English Literature 36, no. 3-4 (2005): 158.

87. 87 Max Picard, The World of Silence, trans. Stanley Godman (Henry Regnery Company, [1948] 1952), 73.

88. 88 Kathryn M. Hunter, ‘Silence in Noisy Archives: Reflections on Judith Allen’s “Evidence and Silence—Feminism and the Limits of History” (1986) in the Era of Mass Digitisation’, Australian Feminist Studies 32, no. 91–92 (2017): 203, doi.org/10.1080/08164649.2017.1357009.

89. 89 Hunter, ‘Silence in Noisy Archives’, 203.

90. 90 Hunter, ‘Silence in Noisy Archives’, 203.

91. 91 Hunter, ‘Silence in Noisy Archives’, 209.

92. 92 Mark C. Taylor, Seeing Silence (University of Chicago Press, 2020), 19, doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226693668.001.0001.

93. 93 Carey, Jack Maggs, 202.

94. 94 Carey, Jack Maggs, 128.

95. 95 Carey, Jack Maggs, 112 (original emphasis).

96. 96 Carey, Jack Maggs, 113.

97. 97 Carey, Jack Maggs, 114 (original emphasis).

98. 98 Carey, Jack Maggs, 65.

99. 99 Hamish Maxwell-Stewart and Rebecca Kippen, ‘Sickness and Death on Convict Voyages to Australia’, in Lives in Transition: Longitudinal Analysis from Historical Sources, ed. Peter Baskerville and Kris Inwood (McGill Queens University Press, 2015), 48, doi.org/10.1515/9780773596689-005.

100. 100 Hamish Maxwell-Stewart, ‘The Search for the Convict Voice’, Tasmanian Historical Studies 6, no. 1 (1998): 82.

101. 101 Paul Donnelly, ‘“When This You See Remember Me”: Convict Love Tokens and Related Keepsakes’, Australasian Journal of Victorian Studies 3, no. 1 (1997): 23, 25.

102. 102 Carey, Jack Maggs, 130.

103. 103 Carey, Jack Maggs, 232.

104. 104 Carey, Jack Maggs, 106.

105. 105 Janet McCalman, ‘Convict Lives: A Research Note’, Australian Journal of Biography and History, no. 7 (2023): 25, doi.org/10.22459/AJBH.07.2023.02.

106. 106 Carey, Jack Maggs, 106 (original emphasis).