Chasing Eliza Miles: An archive story

Reflection on the scholarly practice of 'looking for women in the archives' is a recurring theme in feminist history. Since the 1970s when feminist historians highlighted the range of archival sources that were available to write women into mainstream historiography, we have been as equally concerned with the access and preservation of sources on women as we have been with what these sources can tell us about women's experiences. More recently, some feminist historians have contributed to the scholarship on archives, sharing their 'archive stories', which question the context in which fragmentary records have been preserved, and reflect on their reading, interpretation, and tangible enjoyment of archival sources. The development of digital technologies has expanded this discussion to include the preservation and interpretation of digital and online sources, though the tangible experience of using these sources has not yet been fully addressed. In this archive story I reflect upon my reading of the fragmentary trail of physical and digital sources that I followed on an obsessive search for Eliza Miles, a woman I identified as part of my PhD research on the contributions that women made to the development of the communities on the Jordan goldfields, a Victorian mining region between Jamieson and Walhalla.