Abstract
This article examines a selection of archival records created and preserved in relation to the Aboriginal outlaw Jimmy Governor. It focuses in particular upon a special diary kept by the officers guarding him during his time in the condemned cell at Darlinghurst Gaol in 1900–01. The article considers these records and the various microfilm and digital surrogates used by scholars in terms of the affordances of their specific materiality. It advances an argument about how these particular archival records function as evidence of law, duty and public administration. Whereas in the past Jimmy Governor’s story has primarily been told in the genre of law-breaking, this article argues that these archival records instead reveal him as an agent of law-making. When examined as pages and as paper, the various documents that comprise the Jimmy Governor archive provide evidence of a commitment to the rule of law in a colonial society on the brink of Federation.
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