Tonight I pulled out my archives box. It doesn’t look like anything so formal as the descriptor “archives box” implies. It’s a plastic box with no surviving lid that is full to overflowing with filing cards. It’s the size and type which people sometimes used to use to organise their recipes. The chaos is contained, just, by an ageing, plastic, tattered, pale green Pak’n’Save bag. This box has been with me since 1995. Back then, it was my workhorse of an organising tool for the details of the lives of women involved in the liquor industry in Central Otago between 1861 and 1901. After I submitted my thesis in 1997, I moved on and became a secondary school English teacher, first in Auckland and then in London. It came with me. I became a parent and the box didn’t suffer for the vomit and mess which babies seem to bring with them, because the box was tucked away in a bookcase, or under a desk, out of my mind and the baby’s grasp. I moved back to goldfields count