About the author

Burning Archive is written by Jeff Rich, who is a Melbourne writer of poetry, essays, history and a new genre of prose art: the blog.

I am a quite private, even reclusive person, so the self-dramatisation of the internet does not come readily to me. However, let me reveal, in a way that fits the form, a few things that you might discover yourself with the aid of google and the right search terms.

You can read some of my more academic writing, from long ago, here, where I have saved my PhD and honours history theses from the oblivion of the burning archive.

One chapter from my PhD found its way many years later into a history book prepared in 2006 to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the eight hour day in Melbourne,

Once I was interviewed by an Irish graduate student about my reflections on drug policy in the minor provincial government in which I serve as a lowly under-castellan, and miraculously the audio has found its way onto the internet here

A few of my poems are discoverable – at a community site, called poetry soup, where I ventured out onto the internet for the first time, at the Australian Poetry Journal.

You can even buy a book of my poems, Gathering Flowers of the Mind: Collected Poems 1996-2020 on Amazon and other online retailers. More of my poems are published here, among the flames of the Burning Archive.

I have pursued a career of sorts since 1990 as a lowly under-castellan of a minor provincial government. Little traces of the wreckage of my glittering career have drifted to the shores of some more obscure search terms – my part in an early war on ice, my brief appearance in the hansard for the Senate when working on regional telecommunications, my tribute to the great scholar of alcohol, Robin Room, my reflections on the fiasco of the Melbourne lock-out (liquor licensing), my role speaking on strategic issues for the not-for-profit sector, and more proudly, the paper I gave interpreting the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse.  You can read the report on laws, regulation and services for assisted reproductive treatment or IVF – the landmark Gorton review , in which I am credited, and my encounters with self-murder, less deep than John Donne’s, in the regional government’s policy statement on suicide that I wrote.

In 2021, after years of threatening to do so, I began a podcast on all things history and culture, The Burning Archive. You can find links to episodes scattered throughout this site.