Abstract: This paper explores some initial methodological and theoretical work for a project I am working on with Dr Ashley Barnwell (University of Melbourne), Dr Kylie Cardell (Flinders) and Associate Professor Claire Lynch (Brunel, London) on the ways in which young people in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries have created life narratives of childhood, and/or how life narrative archives are being made about childhood. The broader project will include surveys of children’s life narrative found in diary projects, social media, letter/activist projects, educational contexts, and heritage sites such as museums of childhood. This paper draws on Lynch’s idea of the “ante-autobiography”—the ethics of working with texts that come before public autobiography and/or may never have been intended to be read as autobiography. I survey an initial case study: adults retrospectively speaking back to their childhood selves through the documentary diary project Mortified Nation. I raise some preliminary (methodological, ethical) questions about working retrospectively with child-authored diaries.

Keywords: childhood, youth, diary, Mortified, shame, documentary

Kate Douglas is an Associate Professor in the School of Humanities and Creative Arts at Flinders University. She is the author of Contesting Childhood: Autobiography, Trauma and Memory (Rutgers, 2010) and the co-author (with Anna Poletti) of Life Narratives and Youth Culture: Representation, Agency and Participation (Palgrave, 2016). She is the co-editor (with Kylie Cardell) of Trauma Tales: Auto/biographies of Childhood and Youth (Routledge, 2014) and (with Gillian Whitlock) Trauma Texts (Routledge, 2009). Kate is the head of the steering committee of the International Auto/Biography Association’s Asia-Pacific Chapter. Email: kate.douglas@flinders.edu.au.