Introduction
Personal documents produced in the context of migration are often treated as sources of historical information, valued for the insights they provide into journeys, conditions, and experience. Yet within families, such documents frequently acquire extended lives, being preserved, reused, and reinterpreted across generations. This article examines one such document—a journal kept by Thomas Sinclair during his voyage from Shetland to Western Australia in 1863—not simply as a text, but as a material object whose meanings were produced through successive acts of use.
As Arjun Appadurai and Igor Kopytoff have argued, objects may be understood as having “social lives,” moving through different contexts in which their meanings are continually redefined (Appadurai 3; Kopytoff 67). Following Kopytoff’s concept of the “cultural biography of things,” the journal is treated here as an object whose significance changes across different phases of its existence. In this article, object biography is used not as a rigid method but as a heuristic framework, allowing the successive meanings of the notebook to be traced across different contexts of use. In doing so, the article contributes to scholarship on the materiality of family memory, demonstrating how documents function not only as records but as sites of ongoing social practice.
The Sinclair journal provides a particularly rich case. It begins as a record of migration, is interrupted and left incomplete, is later transformed by the addition of a mourning poem written by Sinclair’s daughter Jessie, and continues to be used within the family for handwriting practice and genealogical record-keeping. Its subsequent movement—from Shetland to a remote sheep station in Western Australia, its physical disassembly, and eventual acquisition by a museum—further extends its trajectory. Through these successive transformations, the notebook becomes a site in which migration, memory, and family life are materially inscribed.
The Journal as Record of Migration
Thomas Sinclair, a fisherman and crofter from Dunrossness in Shetland, emigrated to Western Australia in 1863 with his wife Mary, their children, and Mary’s brother Henry Mainland. During the voyage aboard the Tartar, he kept a journal that records the family’s journey.
The journal follows a chronological structure, organised by date, and reflects the rhythms of the voyage. Sinclair recorded weather conditions, daily routines, illness, discipline, and religious reflection. Like many emigrant narratives, it combines observation with interpretation, offering insight into both the material conditions of the journey and the meanings attached to them.
Routine dominates much of the account. Activities such as “washing from 4 to 8 A.M.” and the airing of bedding on deck reflect the regimented structure of shipboard life. These practices can be understood as part of a broader system of discipline, through which emigrants were incorporated into a controlled environment. At the same time, moments of disruption punctuate this routine. During a storm, Sinclair described “shrieks & cries in every berth & corner,” revealing the emotional intensity of the experience.
Other entries point to the cumulative pressures of the voyage. He recorded “a great cry… for water to drink,” linking this to environmental conditions and inadequate supplies. Food was also a source of tension, with references to “sour or rotten beef.” Such details highlight how the physical conditions of migration shaped everyday experience.
Religious interpretation provided a framework through which these experiences were understood. Sinclair’s Calvinist perspective led him to interpret events in moral and providential terms. Yet he expressed dissatisfaction with shipboard services, describing one sermon as “very weakly” handled and remarking that he “went very hungry away.” These responses indicate that migration involved not only physical relocation but disruption of established forms of religious practice.
While the survival of such a document is relatively rare, emigrant journals themselves were not uncommon in the nineteenth century. The Sinclair notebook may therefore be understood not as unique in kind, but exceptional in its preservation and subsequent reuse. Its value lies not only in what it records, but in the ways in which it continued to be used and reinterpreted.
Interruption: The Unfinished Page
The journal ends abruptly in October 1863. The final entry offers no indication of closure, and is followed by a blank page that had already been headed, suggesting that further writing had been intended.
This unfinished page represents a moment of interruption. It marks the point at which the journal ceased to function as a record of the voyage, while simultaneously creating a space for future inscription. From an object-biographical perspective, this interruption is not simply an absence but a transition, opening the document to subsequent reinterpretation.
Writing After: Mourning and Continuity
In 1868, five years after the voyage and shortly after Thomas Sinclair’s death, his daughter Jessie wrote a poem on the first unused page. It begins:
“My dear, my loved Father, how long he’s away,”
By writing in this location, Jessie established a direct material connection between her father’s account of the voyage and her own expression of grief. The act is significant not only for its emotional content but for its spatial relationship to the earlier text.
The poem transforms the journal from a forward-looking record into a retrospective act of remembrance. It also constitutes a form of continuation. Jessie writes where her father had intended to write, linking her voice to his through the structure of the notebook. In this way, the document becomes a site of intergenerational connection.
Everyday Use: Practice, Discipline, and Lineage
The life of the notebook extends beyond this moment of mourning. Later pages contain repeated sentences written in a careful copperplate hand, suggesting the practice of handwriting, as well as a page recording a simple genealogy of the Sinclair family.
These additions demonstrate that the notebook remained in active use within the household. Rather than being preserved unchanged, it was incorporated into everyday practices of learning and record-keeping. The handwriting exercises, in particular, suggest the notebook’s role in processes of discipline and education. The repetition of sentences reflects not only the acquisition of skill but the cultivation of order and attention.
Similarly, the genealogical page indicates an interest in lineage as a form of knowledge to be maintained and transmitted. In this sense, the notebook functions as a medium through which family identity is both recorded and produced.
As David Morgan has argued, family life is constituted through everyday practices, many of which leave material traces (Morgan 45). The continued use of the notebook illustrates this process clearly. Its value lay not only in its original content but in its ongoing role as a tangible link between generations. Memory, in this context, is not confined to acts of commemoration but embedded in routine activity.
Movement and Transformation: From Shetland to Museum
The later trajectory of the notebook adds a further dimension to its biography. It remained within the family and is believed to have been among the papers of Margaret Cook at her sheep station, “Noondoonia,” in south-eastern Western Australia.
The movement of the notebook from Shetland to this remote location mirrors the migration it originally recorded. At some stage, the notebook was physically altered, its pages removed and preserved as loose leaves. This transformation shifted the object from a bound narrative to a fragmented archive.
The document later entered the antiquarian market and was acquired by the Esperance Museum in 2002. In this context, it is reclassified, its value shifting from familial significance to historical and institutional meaning. As Kopytoff suggests, such transitions reflect movement between different regimes of value (68).
Conclusion
The journal of Thomas Sinclair demonstrates that personal documents produced in the context of migration can acquire meanings that extend far beyond their original function. Initially created as a record of a voyage, the notebook became, through successive acts of use, a layered object in which migration, mourning, education, and lineage were materially inscribed.
Its later history reinforces this interpretation. Preserved within the family, carried across continents, physically altered, and eventually incorporated into a museum collection, the notebook has itself undergone a process of transformation. In this sense, it mirrors the movements and reconfigurations experienced by the family it belonged to.
By approaching the journal as an object rather than simply as a text, it becomes possible to trace these successive layers of meaning. The Sinclair notebook thus offers a compelling example of how migration is not only recorded but materially lived, remembered, and reworked over time.
Works Cited
Appadurai, Arjun, editor. The Social Life of Things. Cambridge UP, 1986.
Kopytoff, Igor. “The Cultural Biography of Things.” The Social Life of Things, Cambridge UP, 1986, pp. 64–91.
Morgan, David. Family Practices. Polity Press, 1996.
Kuhn, Annette. Family Secrets: Acts of Memory and Imagination. Verso, 1995.
Sinclair, Thomas. Journal of the Voyage of the Tartar, 1863. Esperance Museum.
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