CAN YOU KILL a ghost? While writing this I was helping my son with a creative non-fiction work for the NSW HSC. In that work, he adroitly and with license in theory and philosophy, uses my story, which has become his, and which in one manuscript opens on the death of my biological German father, and my sense of killing a poem. My son describes a haunting that might have come to him in the womb. Inspired by John Berger’s Hold Everything Dear: Dispatches on Survival and Resistance (2007), he makes his childhood home and the politics of place, on Dharug and Gundungurra Country in the Blue Mountains, the fulcrum for a digressive essay, at times Sebaldian in diction, to create a persona to touch, with a rich exploration from reading, on the violence of war and colonialism and the impossibility of separating self from history. Figures referenced include his war-traumatised, hermit grandfather, who I only met in southern Tasmania at twenty-four, after the death, not yet sixty, of my Aboriginal stepdad. It already seems easier at that generational remove. The ghosts a little distant.

Ghosts, held dear, inhabit poems. In July 1988 I received a typed letter with the book, Deadly James and Other Poems (1987)by Paris-based black American poet and scholar, James A. Emanuel, illustrated by Nicole Lamotte. He wrote to thank me for my phone call confirming his reading at the Harold Park Hotel in Glebe, facilitated by fellow-poet Judith Rodriguez, and he enclosed ‘publicity data’ and posters from readings at London (North) Polytechnic and Oxford University. I remember being impressed by critical and biographical notes as end-matter in the book, mapping a scholarly world, beyond our shores, supporting poets, and his life from rural farmwork to university on the GI bill, to a PhD, and teaching the first course in black American poetry, at City College, New York. The book’s title poem, Deadly James (For All the Victims of Police Brutality) was in one of seven sets, on different themes.

It was a rainy, last winter Tuesday when James Emanuel caught a taxi from where he was staying at Oxford Towers in Darlinghurst, bringing with him a suitcase of books, of which he had written, ‘Partly to lighten my luggage for the return trip, I’ll see if any of the audience will aid that convenience by buying some …’ The taxi dropped him at the hotel on the corner, where on a blackboard, James A. Emanuel (France), was chalked with others on the bill, the sign part lit by helium lights from the Harold Park raceway, distant through rain squalls, on the other side of Wigram Road. With the double glass doors to the lounge bar on Ross Street kept closed, the venue was entered via the public bar, and but for that blackboard it might have seemed the wrong place, with semi-curious regulars, a pool table and the cigarette smoke and stale beer warmth of welcome.

I remembered a modest audience, although he describes it, in the archive, as large. Readings began with writers tutored by Billy-Marshall Stone-King, followed by Roberta ‘Bobbi’ Sykes, who observed of that confused Bicentennial year that it ‘asks us to rejoice in our own dispossession’. Bundjalung author Ruby Langford Ginibi, who now has the Ginibi Room for Indigenous researchers at the State Library of NSW, named for her — by which I think she would be taken aback, while proud — read next from her at the time not-yet-published, first autobiography, Don’t Take Your Love to Town.

I wonder, writing this, what vision of Australia in 1988 our Paris-based visitor might have begun to compose of this moment. One aspect of the ‘rich confusion’ of American identity, as described by James Baldwin in 1952, pornographic with a second Trump presidency, as explored by Adam Schatz in the essay ‘Visions of America’ (2026), is glimpsed here. In 1983, just five years before, while James Emanuel was away from the US, teaching in Europe, his only son, James Emanuel Jr, days after a brutal beating by three police officers, took his own life, after which his father vowed never to return to the US. I only learned of that in writing this and learned too that he rarely spoke of it in life. Few people in that room could have known who he was or read his work. And I could not really have deduced that loss, for its reality still so close, at the time — it was veiled in the book’s preface as the title ‘focal’ poem being mid-point (with that inclusive dedication), contributing ‘unconscious interplay behind each poem’ and with Biblical allusion, for the poems to collectively argue ‘how experience “bitter in thy belly” can flower … in love at first sight, roller skate girls, and flowers that pop open.’

There was stage lighting, and people seated close. He explained that while his books were priced, people might pay what they could, or if they had no money, they could take them. He embodied his poems, a spell cast by his voice, and in lines from his final, ‘Poet as Fisherman’:

I have propped a well-thumbed book
against the butt of my favourite rod
and fished from my heart.

Yet, for my labors,
all I have to show
are tactics, lore —
so little I know
of that pea-sized brain I am casting for,
to think it could swim
with the phantom-words
that lure me
to this shore.

He left with an empty suitcase.

JACQUES DERRIDA, IN Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression (1995), reminds us that archives are never neutral storehouses of memory but charged and sometimes fragile sites of law, power, secrecy and loss. They keep and at the same time threaten to erase; they promise the future as much as they recall the past.

The State Library of NSW, on Gadigal lands of the Eora Nation, has an archive of public readings by contemporary writers on Tuesday nights at the Harold Park Hotel from 1986 to 1994, called The Writers in the Park Collection. There are documents, even some video, yet the archival heart is in writers’ voices in 500 hours of readings. In 2012 the library began to digitise, preserve and make accessible iconic and at-risk heritage collections. By 2017 the 438 magnetic audio tapes had been converted.

There is a ghost in there with them.

IT BEGAN AS a family thing, extended to friends. Publican Mark Morgan, a former barrister who ran the pub, inherited from their father, with brothers Simon and Matthew, floated the idea over the bar one night with a friend from Sydney Boys High School days, George Papaellinas. George had studied classical Greek at Sydney Uni, driven taxis and was a young writer with Cypriot Greek and Egyptian heritage, at the NSW Institute of Technology (later UTS). An aspiring scriptwriter, also working behind the bar, Kim O’Brien, did much of the initial organising and publicity, and was the charming, effortless host on those first literary Tuesday nights in the black-walled lounge bar with its rock and roll vibe. She worked alongside sometimes roguishly indignant George, with his contacts via Glebe based literary agent, Rose Creswell. In a newspaper photo in 1985, in the public bar, Kim smiling and head tilted stands to one side and behind George with her arms folded and resting on his shoulder. They may have passed as a couple. The caption quotes George citing the hotel ‘as the centre of the Glebe Push’. George and his partner Catharine also lived around the corner from independent and academic specialist bookstore, Gleebooks, where co-owners David Gaunt and Roger McKell and staff were an often-daily source of friendship and insight. Picture foot-loose, literary-man-about-town George with fine rimmed, round-framed spectacles, already thinning pate at thirty-one, a slight build, with a uniform of Breton stripe T-shirts, black jeans and sardonic grin.

When the idea for the readings series was publicly aired before that night, poet Les A. Murray thought it might risk alienating punters — past readings were often short-lived, elitist cliques. Or it might have come to resemble the Glebe and Balmain writers’ scene of the 1960s and ‘70s, or Sydney Festival Writers’ Week at Town Hall, in January that year where a panel on multicultural issues had three white blokes. They planned a run of twelve. The first night in September 1985, unexpectedly, drew an audience of hundreds, and after an open section, with readers names lost to time, featured Frank Moorhouse, Colleen Burke and Jean Bedford, all writers from Rose’s list. It was the mid-1980s, when the Whitlam legacy and Australia Council funding fostered a flourishing literary culture. It met a need to hear the stories we tell ourselves. And it soon garnered intersectional energy, helped by the growing cultural assertion of indigenous, multicultural, feminist and queer perspectives, by George’s eagerness to network, and when Kim left, by undergraduates, Jan Hutchinson, Sue Chin and Margo Daly. The writing program at UTS, taught by influential writers, supplied students as organisers over the life of the series. Margo, a fellow student and friend, who in the 2000s became my wife and mother of our two children, remembers George being fun to work with. It attracted a broad range of writers, and internationals, especially before and after Adelaide Writers’ Week. Ian McEwan, Graham Swift, Joseph Škvorecký and Nawal El Saadawi were listed on street posters, taped on poles and in bookstore and café windows in the inner west and as far as Bondi, when readings began to be taped in 1986.

As James Wood writes in The nearest thing to life (2015), of criticism as passionate ‘re-description … it’s a kind of critical act to hear a poet or novelist read aloud her poem or a piece of his prose … There is good reason after all, why writers have always been interested in actors and acting; there is a sense in which the actor is the purest, the first critic’. From early preconceptions, imagining ‘audio visual’ theatre, with writers getting a split of the bar-take, as bands did, it mostly settled on emerging writers reading with those more established, paid and given tickets for free drinks, with books sold via Gleebooks on a table with a cash box at the door. Run by volunteers, in early years accruing debt to the pub to pay writers and door staff on quieter Tuesday nights, a raw magic had it endure. At times publicity chanced: Frank Hardy arrested and jailed for overdue parking fines on one of his last ever public appearances; offal thrown from a performance; those double glass doors shattered during a reading by Ken Kesey; later Timothy Leary, drawing several hundred, most watching overflow video in the public bar and newer bistro. Helen Garner, in a handwritten note in 1986 caught the humbler essence:

‘The Harold Park Hotel readings are the best fun in Australia for writers and readers. The audiences are big, intelligent and warmly attentive; the range of writers is wide. Anyone can afford to get in and the writers get paid a decent amount for their evening’s work. The organisation is subtle, unobtrusive and quite brilliant. I love going there, both to read and to listen.’

AS A SECOND-YEAR undergraduate and editor of a student-led anthology, I was asked by George and Jan to help. Having left school at fifteen and left Tasmania as a nineteen-year-old electrician, I’d been a waiter, cook and kitchen manager, spent time with a first girlfriend in the country, and back in Sydney to study was a part-time night porter in a Bondi Beach rock-band motel. In the background was my living with my playwright girlfriend (still close and my son’s Godmother) and that paternal story, just a year old. Picture me in 1987 with daytime uniform of shorts, T-shirt, ponytail and backpack, cycling the monthly program to be typeset in Potts Point, then to the printer on Glebe Point Road.

When single mum Jan, burned out, escaped in April 1988, I was joined by Ann Mossop. Ann was recruited by Mark’s then wife, Gretel Kileen, Ann’s friend from Ravenswood School for Girls, and a writer, comedian and later presenter of Big Brother. George, having received an Australia Council grant, stepped aside to write in early 1987. He was back in September 1988 via Carnivalé multicultural festival literary events, that he named Dis/Unities, which I co-organised with him at the pub in 1989, over a weekend in the newer bistro area, and I took on the bulk of organising Dis/Unities in 1990 when George had moved to Melbourne with his partner for her new job at Trades Hall. He also in 1989 helped Nichola Robinson found a weekend series for children’s authors in that glass-walled bistro, called Aloud in the Park. He and Jan were guest co-editors for a second anthology in issue 1/1989 of Meanjin.

Ann and I further broadened the program, attracting talent, events, media, and consistently large audiences. We repaid a debt, gained NSW Government funding for regional writers, and raised money for a third anthology, a fifth-birthday issue in 1990, that I co-edited with Bruce Pascoe for Australian Short Stories. George contributed, alongside Tom Keneally and Keri Hume (I stretched ‘Australian’ to fit her). You need this context. I was by then also coordinator of the Perrier Writers’ Week, at the State Library as part of January’s Sydney Festival, and I helped establish Writing NSW as its first public officer. For 1992, with festival audience numbers doubled, I convinced Sydney Festival to diversify sponsorship, which I sourced, and to recast a working committee for the first Sydney Writers’ Festival, still at the library with umbrella events at Belvoir Street and UTS.

THE MITCHELL WING of the State Library is entered off Shakespeare Place by sandstone steps under tall Ionic columns. Sitting there after a last writers’ festival session in 1992, with crowds dispersed that January Sunday — and in that odd calm after so much attention, I could not have known it would be my last. I walked home across the Domain with then broadcaster Robert Dessaix, who told me a story of trust and ambiguous intimacies, of his being lured by youths and robbed in Morocco, which sixteen years later would appear in his book Arabesques: A Tale of Double Lives (2008).

Is that belatedness like Freud’s notion in psychoanalysis of ‘afterwardsness’ — Nachträglichkeit in German, Après-coup in French — a sense arrived at, and for me here, in restitution, via re-memory, after time? For many years my telling this story brought tears and tightness in my chest.

To revisit the archives is to confront questions that Derrida poses around the authority of custodianship, the technical apparatus that shapes what can be remembered, the destructive forces that shadow preservation, and the ‘fever’ that drives us to recover and relive what might otherwise be forgotten, against the death work of a silent, hidden impulse. Magnetic tapes carry the paradox in miniature. The mixing desk near the back of the room. Labelled cassettes scattered in the basement office. Simon Morgan also recorded videos, Ken Kesey in one. The ABC and BBC filmed readings. A library spreadsheet, that will eventually help host audio files, notes ambient venue sounds and music between sets. I especially remember jazz by Miles Davis.

‘Thirty years is a long time,’ library executive and oral historian Sally Hone said, walking away with corporate documents, acquisition-related, also retrieved for my visit, but then considered too sensitive for me to see. ‘Your name is mentioned a lot’.

IN OCTOBER 1989 George let Mark and Simon know the library might take the tapes to conserve them. Rose Creswell had been speaking to Paul Brunton, senior curator of manuscripts, later Mitchell Librarian. As they were recorded on pub equipment, rights were needed and George presented a ‘letter of assignment’, which Simon understood ‘gave he and Rose the power to donate the tapes.’ Simon had to convince Mark it was kosher. A permission form was drafted in keeping with donation, that recordings were to be accessed only in the library, with writer’s retaining copyright.

Ann and I sent requests to past readers and had forms signed each night, explaining the donation, as did others on the door; friends and writers Rosie Dub and Justine Ettler, Kirsty Machon and Stephen Dunn, and later as organisers, Dallas McMaugh, with Greg Poppleton and Helen Loughlin. George informed me that for my gathering and checking tapes there’d be a small fee from the library. He suggested I need not tell Ann. We groaned, eyes rolled, when I did — self-appointed-emeritus George was intent on dividing us. Ann after all was not his pick. She was, by his definition, too bourgeoise. And Ann was not in thrall of George. That distance would prove a blessing.

George was very likeable, if he liked you. I considered he and his partner my friends. He dismissed my saying I could walk the tapes to the library. I’d checked and listed them, what more was needed? I took boxes of tapes to him in Fitzroy, and from my being ever-a-gardener, in thanks for staying overnight, and for being able to go along to a McPhee Gribble publishers’ function, where I met Sophie Cunningham for the first time, I pruned back courtyard-shading wisteria, letting in Melbourne sunlight.

Ninety-two visiting writers from more than twenty countries read at Writers in the Park. Recordings capture a live transnational conversation, local writers and audiences meeting global literary and political currents, all as rich in their own ways as that opening scene of a last winter Tuesday. Angela Carter, Douglas Adams, Roddy Doyle, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Witi Ihimaera, Hanif Kureshi, Eduardo Galeano, Margaret Atwood and Michael Ondatje, and Australians, of hundreds, David Malouf, Les Murray, Peter Porter, Elizabeth Jolley, Kate Grenville, David Williamson, Peter Corris, Peter Carey, J M Coetzee and Oodgeroo Noonucal — signed permission for library tapes donation.

PHONE CALLS ARE not in pre-digital archives, nor internet access and email, which Derrida envisioned being so disruptive of archival practice, collapsing the distinction between public and private, reconfiguring memory and forgetting, was a few years away, when in June 1992 I phoned Rose to ask about the tapes. ‘George just got paid $15,000 for the first consignment,’ she said, cheerfully, then realised I wasn’t supposed to know. Perhaps an hour later, although in memory it condenses to minutes, a loud knock on the door was a helmet-wearing motorcycle courier who handed me a letter of demand from a solicitor, on George’s behalf. Demanding that I keep my mouth shut. Spending time in archives makes you realise the power of documents. I probably binned it. I don’t know if he planned to create some other complicity, or simply considered it fait accompli, but the taint and sense of complicity hung, and along with betrayal, was corrosive. From Shakespeare’s Hamlet, ‘the rest is silence’— with silence and no contact since.

I find courage and substance in the telling now from voices in that collection, and by its being a shared story. Inspired too by Roland Barthes’ idea of the grain of the voice — of the body conveyed in song, with the power to move us. To stretch it from aesthetics to ontology, I imagine that immanent sense of the being that questions Being that Heidegger called Dasein, the sense of Being-in-the-world through which we find the grain of ourselves already belonging.

THE MITCHELL LIBRARY reading room, in the Beaux-Arts classical style, has a high, coffered, sky-lit ceiling that falls to stacked mezzanine tiers of high timber bookcases, and rows at desks below in silent study. Being in that hush brings distance, a curious remove to materials decades old yet familiar, and to a different self, altered by time. Trust in archives. A trusted space. In the screened-off area for special collections, after signing to agree to the law, ethics and care of the archive, boxes are first weighed, to be opened and read at desks under the watchful gaze of librarians. Only writing materials are allowed, and pencils, to avoid ink. Documents in gloss white folders are tied with white ribbon.

Among documents, I soon found my ghost. It was in a letter supporting his nomination for a community arts award in 1986. Publican Mark, as signatory, in unstinting praise, seemed to have based the text on knowledge of every phone call George ever made, or imagined making, extraordinary of itself, as George talked a lot, usually while chain-smoking, and it even included a George-like, vaguely Marxist, conception of literature and writing as craft and community art. The syntax and mannerisms in rhetoric familiar: ‘George is aware of this letter, though not of its contents in detail’.

Another document has my phantom raw. After the publication of that second anthology, writer Margaret McClusky wrote Meanjin editor Jenny Lee, in praise, with ‘one disappointment’; that Kim O’Brien, had not been given due credit. Kim, with Carol Christie as co-editor, and supported by the collective of mostly woman writers, Jan McKemmish among them, at FAB press, had published Writers in the Park: The Book 1985/96, now in the archive. George’s response, over four vitriolic pages, starts by saying that his mentioning Kim at all was a ‘little white lie’ and to conclude she was just a barmaid and sacked, and worse. Literary legerdemain doesn’t save it. I can’t help but wonder at the hubris, in notions of his centrality as ‘principal everything’ as he had Mark say in that letter of support, and at damage inflicted on so many others elsewhere, as we came to learn over time. Even our lawyer, having also known George from Sydney Boys High School, was more than happy to work pro-bono.

POWER TO SILENCE has intricate and subtle inflections. And others not so subtle. After entreating calls by others, including David Gaunt, George’s intransigence left us no recourse but law. A Magistrates Court date was set for late August 1992, with Ann and I as plaintiffs, being office-bearers in the unincorporated association, Writers in the Park, with gentle David our dispute-wary President. David had cause to worry about commercial and reputational damage. George convinced others of his entitlement, and a sustained campaign against us, led by journalist and writer Richard (Dick) Hall, enlisted many in Rose’s agency and beyond.

With the issue hanging, the Sydney Writers’ Festival committee met at the library in late June to plan for January 1993. I sent out an agenda that included, at NSW Ministry for the Arts request, a briefing by Renato Rispoli, Director of Carnivalé. The September state-wide festival was to be folded into Sydney Festival, including writers’ events, the core funded from Treasury. Renato’s brief seemed ad hoc and contradictory, with Carnivalé being integral but somehow separate, with an anthology, titled Harbour, edited by George, following an anthology, Homelands (1991). That committee of good people, I believe, felt played, as did I. Library Education Manager, Helen Kon, spoke up for my remaining. The minutes end, ‘[name redacted] to decide if would stay on …’

At request from the defence, the case was adjourned until February 1993 and reported in The Sydney Morning Herald as ‘Writer’s group seeks return of tapes payment’. As Carolyn Steedman has it in ‘Something She Called a Fever: Michelet, Derrida, and Dust’ (2001), ‘Archives hold no origins, and origins are not what historians search for in them. Rather, they hold everything in medias res, the account caught halfway through, most of it missing, with no end ever in sight. Nothing starts in the Archive, nothing, ever at all, although things certainly end up there.’ When the Herald declined to print a pro-defence letter, co-signed by prominent writers, in response to that story, it was circulated as being officially from the UTS Faculty of Humanities by another novelist teacher — possibly motivated (mistakenly, ironically) having been threatened with defamation three years prior. The signed cover-note is archived; the letter is missing.

A Gap in the Records was the title of a short, genre-defying, feminist thriller by Jan McKemmish, also a UTS writing teacher, friend and regular reader, as was poet Dorothy Porter, Dorothy being also a friend of George’s, and both women died young from breast cancer. It was Duende-loving Dorothy, evoked in her sister Josie McSkimming’s memoir and biography, Gutsy Girls (2025), who first lured me into the archive, remembering her voice and imagining podcasts. Dorothy at one time also shared a UTS office and had a crush on that later campaigning author. Was that orphaned page at the back of one archive folder — blank but for random names in biro — substituted for a page removed? No records of access are kept. And concerns for privacy, understandably, preclude inquiry. I will eventually learn what exactly that letter said and who co-signed it. Part of me still doesn’t want to know.

As Derrida has it, the archive’s law both safeguards and suppresses the voices it gathers; every act of preservation carries within it a principle of exclusion. Ditto law itself. The defence in that second hearing, cynically subpoenaed co-plaintiff David as a character witness for George. Barrister (and aspiring writer) Tom Molomby, now senior counsel, asked a series of loaded, closed questions, and David, that way humiliated, was dismissed. As was the case for defence. Ordered to pay $15,000 plus costs, George stalled, with plans to appeal, vexing a series of lawyers for four long years. Ann shielded me in being a key contact with the library.

It was a relief, I told myself after time, to be at one remove, yet when I inducted Margaret Bourke from the library education office, to coordinate the 1993 writers’ festival, I left a career I loved. Ann went on to co-present The Festival of Dangerous ideas with the St James Ethics Centre and to found the All about Women Festival. She is now artistic director of the much grander, corporate, year-round, Sydney Writers’ Festival, chasing Nobel laureates.George was a writer and teacher whose career combined authorship, editorship, university teaching, and the founding and stewardship of literary events, through which he mentored and championed many writers. He was sentimental with his ‘buddies’. Yet disunity also served power, even hate, with unity partisan, measured in favours. It all seems such a shame, infantile and futile, in its origins, destruction.

In 2005 George wrote of living with and battling multiple sclerosis.

With all that has shaped and coloured our lives, including raising children, responses to this recount came from that wholly human archive, of feeling. David felt ‘a bolt from the blue’, needing to meet, ‘if for no better reason than to share something painful with someone who had to live through it all’. Ann ‘loved going into that world of the past, although it also made me cry just to think about us being so young and passionate about the cause and also to think of how difficult the whole thing was for you’.

THE GHOST LONG forgiven is sealed back in with a white bow not nearly as artfully tied. Considering tributes in memoriam, I began to list the dead, yet it brought a morbid sensation, as if my pencil, here in past’s future, might determine their fate.

We can make our fate in writing. A lesser sum recovered funded an emerging writer’s fellowship, awarded in 1998 to poet Keri Glastonbury and in 1999, to author Suneeta Peres DeCosta. Keri at eighteen, the age my son is now, had been an open section regular, travelling from Wagga Wagga as a high school student. In her first featured reading, on September 5, 1989, aged twenty, she sounds so young, yet confident — lucid and ‘naively sharp’, to borrow a phrase from her final poem. Keri read before Joanne Burns, Bernice Rubens from the UK, Kate Grenville and Helen Garner on a night themed for Feminist Book Fortnight. She dedicated that final poem, ‘Ms’ to ‘some English teachers I had at school’. Life and invention coequal.