Introduction

This collection demonstrates the vast scope of contemporary life writing studies, ranging from established biographical and historical research through to creative and performative works. The impulse to pay respect to lost, hidden or unacknowledged lives, especially those shaped by invasion, colonisation, war and conflict, is a thread that weaves together many of the diverse narratives. Covering a wide timeframe from the eighteenth century through to the early twenty-first century, the accounts span Australasia and the Pacific, North America, Britain, Europe, Asia and Africa. The emphasis is on passages between one place or one life and another, with associated notions of exile and escape, in the wider context of transnational ism and globalisation. An underlying theme is the complex relationship between identity and belonging. The extraordinary lives reconstructed or recovered here have been retrieved from the archives, restored through testimony, or reimagined through art. The role of the researcher is foregrounded, showing that the processes through which lives, history and memory are recorded or reconstructed are just as important as the search for an authentic instance or historical truth. Indeed, it is this very activity that brings history into the present. It is the process by which one engages and interacts with the vestiges and traces of a life in order to recover it through life writing.