This paper examines the use of ‘archival poetics’ in contemporary history writing, with a specific focus on the use of archival images in Mark McKenna’s An Eye for Eternity: the Life of Manning Clark and Kim Scott’s novel Benang, from the Heart. It investigates the ways in which the authors of these works move away from the would-be forensic approaches embodied in a certain kind of historiography’s approach to the archive, to create a more personal, powerful and situated kind of history writing. It argues that these works suggest that history is less about the sublime chaos of the past — which cannot be narrated without duplicity, damage or violence — than how we engage the past, which is, on reflection, an entirely different thing.