About Joan's Archive Joan's life is not particularly exceptional. What makes it extraordinary, however, is the way that she has meticulously and comprehensively recorded it over the last seventy years. The material she has amassed is overwhelming. Travel journals dating back to 1937, daily diaries beginning in 1940, sketchbooks spanning forty years, dozens of photograph albums and hundreds of colour slides (each individually hand-labelled and separately recorded in notebooks), personal letters, numerous jotters of lists and memoranda, newspaper clippings, and official documents - every item stored carefully to prevent damage. This personal archive, documenting one life in such detail, is now a large body of material with an uncertain future. Unfortunately, just as her personal collection is comprehensive, it is also incomplete. A flood in her bungalow in 2006 irreparably damaged a number of the diaries. In 2008, suffering from dementia and unable to care for herself any longer, she was moved into a nursing home. The bungalow she had lived in since 1963 was emptied and sold. At this juncture, a large collecting of cassette tapes of her concert recordings were disposed of, and her annotated sheet music was given away. The fact that so much was kept, on the other hand, reflects the importance her family placed upon these documents when sorting through her belongings on her behalf. Joan is now residing in a nursing home, and suffering from the advanced stages of dementia. All of the material that she so carefully collected now means little or nothing to her in her failing memory. Perhaps the ultimate tragic irony is that her life is still being recorded, now in online daily health reports which it is the home's policy to generate for the benefit of her next of kin.

ABOUT JOAN'S WAR

ABOUT JOAN