Archives and Societal Provenance: Australian Essays

Chandos Information Professional Series

Archives and Societal Provenance

Australian essays

Michael Piggott

Table of Contents

Cover image

Title page

Copyright

A prologue to the afterlife

Acknowledgements

About the author

Chapter 1: Introduction: societal provenance

Abstract.

Terroir, culture and the individual

The aura of societal provenance

Australia and the Australian people

Other terminology

Applying societal provenance

Part 1: History

Chapter 2: Themes in Australian recordkeeping, 1788â€"2010

Abstract.

British recordkeeping legacy

The governing machinery

Immigrant nation

The ordinary Australian: free immigrants and soldiers

Conclusion

Chapter 3: Schellenberg in Australia: meaning and precedent

Abstract.

Assessing Schellenberg’s visit

Impact on the Paton Inquiry, and on Schellenberg

Political use

Cultural cringe

Impact of later visitors

Chapter 4: Archives: an indispensable resource for Australian historians?

Abstract.

The three-stage discovery model

Just how important are archives?

The Australian archives-history nexus

In summary

Chapter 5: The file on H

Abstract.

Part 2: Institutions

Chapter 6: Libraries and archives: from subordination to partnership

Abstract.

The setting – the 1950s

Schellenberg and the Paton Inquiry

Librarians’ guest, archivists’ hope

National Library Inquiry Committee

Inquiry membership

The inquiry supports separation

The arguments

Other later developments

Chapter 7: Making sense of prime ministerial libraries

Abstract.

Meanings

Benefits

Challenges

Conclusion

Chapter 8: War, sacred archiving and C.E.W.Bean

Abstract.

The setting

Archives

What it all meant

Part 3: Formation

Chapter 9: Saving the statistics, destroying the census

Abstract.

Conducting the census

Confidentiality

The current debate

Supporting destruction

The case for retention

Claim and counter-claim

The independent inquiry

Reflections

Chapter 10: Documenting Australian business: invisible hand or centrally planned?

Abstract

Handicaps and solutions

Conditioning factors

Chapter 11: Appraisal ‘firsts’ in twenty-first-century Australia

Abstract.

Trust and Technology

Appraising census forms

Business archives

Australian Society of Archivists

In summary

Part 4: Debates

Chapter 12: Two cheers for the records continuum

Abstract.

The early to mid-1990s

Monash University

Frank Upward

The Australian audience

Abstractions, words and diagrams

Accolades and assessments

The inevitable limits of continuum theory

Chapter 13: Recordkeeping and recordari: listening to Percy Grainger

Abstract:

Percy Grainger

Rose Grainger

The recordkeeper

Finding an archives host

A convenient form of artificial memory

The Remembrancer

Rich archive, wretched memory

Memory-dependent recordkeeping

Chapter 14: Alchemist magpies? Collecting archivists and their critics

Abstract.

Historian friends

Sir Hilary Jenkinson

Chris Hurley

Richard Cox

A partial rejoinder

The collecting archivist

The results of collecting: it hardly matters

The results of collecting: it matters

Chapter 15: The poverty of Australia’s recordkeeping history

Abstract.

Acquisition

Destruction

Problems with traditional history

Criticism 1: it starts only in 1788

Criticism 2: a dated notion of what archives are and what archivists do

Criticism 3: the neglect of recordkeeping systems history

Criticism 4: the absence of a history of the record

Conclusion

Chapter 16: Acknowledging Indigenous recordkeeping

Abstract.

Definitions

The need for new definitions

Tanderrum

Message sticks

Cognitive records, Dreaming archives

Towards an inclusive Australian archival science

Epilogue: an archival afterlife

Reference

Index

Copyright

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© M. Piggott, 2012

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A prologue to the afterlife

Michael Moss, Professor,     Research Professor in Archival Studies, Humanities Advanced Technology and Information Institute, University of Glasgow

Ex America semper aliquid novi or, Canberra calling are you receiving me?

We would substitute Australia in this Latin tag, which Sir Hilary Jenkinson used in his review of T.R. Schellenberg’s Modern Archives: Principles and Techniques,¹ but we on the other side of the world would, I hope, employ it with respect and not heavy irony. In this combination of new writing and a selection from his oeuvre across his working life and into ‘retirement’, which Michael has put together himself rather than leave it to others to do so when he has shuffled off his mortal coil, he returns often to the debate between these two titans who dominated professional practice and literature during his long career as a scholar and archivist, or perhaps it should be the other way round.

When he invited me to open the ‘batting’ apart from the memorable tweet ‘Canberra calling’, like a kookaburra caught in a snare, he gave me no instructions or advice. It seemed impolite to say no or words to that effect. Perhaps others had done so; he assures me they had not. I was his first choice to open against the Aussies. The very act of his contacting me by e-mail emphasises the tractability and potential for interaction that the Internet affords, not just to scholars but to everyone who engages with archives and much else besides. As Alexander Stille reminds us in The Future of the Past, genealogy ranks a close second to pornography as the most popular activity on the Internet.² The affordance of the Internet, overlooked by many scholars, is the context in which these essays should be read.

It is the task of the writer of prefaces not to ‘bury Caesar, but to praise him’, to parody Marc Antony. I want to go further by exploring how the many balls Michael has hit towards the boundary throughout his career, often by poking fun at the self-image of his countrymen, will not be ‘interred with his bones’. One of Michael’s cris de cour is for more research into archival practice in the context of Australia. I would want to go further. ‘Up here’ we have made a start by looking at the way recordkeeping practice seeped through what has come to be known as the British Empire. It is easy to imagine that from the European discovery of Australia and settlement in other parts of the world there was some kind of grand Kiplingesque imperial project. You only have to read Stephanie Williams’ new book Running the Show, a collection of vignettes of pro-consuls, to realise what a creaky outfit it was until Joseph Chamberlain arrived at the Colonial Office in 1895 and started to bring order out of chaos, which included a degree of autonomy to the so-called white colonies.³ Nevertheless there was a way of doing things, however imperfectly, borrowed largely from the equally chaotic home civil service. For recordkeeping that was the registry system which in a long gestation from about the time of the so-called Tudor revolution in government emerged pretty much fully fledged at the end of the nineteenth century.⁴

This was wonderfully lampooned by Anthony Trollope, who himself held a senior position in the Post Office, in his novel The Three Clerks. At the core of the registry system was the docket from which the file creakily developed and for which Trollope composed this little ditty:

My heart’s at my office, my heart is always there –

My heart’s at my office, docketing with care;

Docketing the papers, and copying all day,

My heart’s at my office, though I be far away.⁵

The office in question was the fictitious department of Inland Navigation. When it was abolished as part of the reform of the civil service in 1853 ‘and the dull, dingy rooms were vacant. Ruthless men shovelled off as waste paper all the lock entries of which Charley [Tudor – one of the three clerks] had once been so proud; and the ponderous ledgers, which Mr. Snape [another clerk] had delighted to haul about, were sent away into Cimmerian darkness, and probably to utter destruction.’⁶ Another of the three clerks, Alaric Tudor, having served a prison sentence for embezzlement, emigrates to Australia no doubt imposing on his adopted country the recordkeeping systems learned in his early career that were so full of promise.

We can speculate from Michael’s essay ‘War, sacred archiving and C.E.W. Bean’, which forms Chapter 8 of this volume, that British registry practice must have impacted on Bean’s work. He would have seen it meticulously implemented in Lloyd George’s wartime Ministry of Munitions and the efforts that were made to preserve its registry so as to write its multi-volume history.⁷ When he became Prime Minister in 1916 Lloyd George took the practice with him to the Cabinet Office and in the immediate aftermath of the war set up the Treasury O&M department to police its introduction across Whitehall and the colonial possessions.⁸ Concern about the history of recordkeeping is one I share with Michael, not simply because it is of academic interest, but emphatically because it is the foundations on which democratic societies with their commitment to social justice and the rule of law are built.⁹ The Treasury O&M department warrants investigation from every corner of the Commonwealth.

We must, however, beware of claiming too much. Michael is right when he cautions in Chapter 12 ‘what archival science lacks is a theory for a sociology of recordkeeping’. Do not ‘ruthless men’ armed with shovels make a greater impact than one or two timid archivists? Here is fertile ground for trans-disciplinary engagement that I have recently explored in ‘Is it a question of trust or why are we afraid to go to Nineveh?’¹⁰ I cite this only because by drawing attention to this lacuna, Michael opens the door onto the solipsistic nature of much archival research for which he chides us good humouredly from other perspectives. We will come to these. A ‘sociology of recordkeeping’ must embrace power relationships which we could describe less starkly as governance, something that is lacking in the continuum model for which Michael only gives two less than hearty cheers in Chapter 12.

Let us explore for a moment what this might mean. For Anthony Giddens, on whose structuration theory the continuum model is built, this came about because of the asymmetry in the distribution of resources that inevitably leads to a dialectic of control where those without resources seek to win power or at least influence ‘the circumstances of action of others’.¹¹ It is in these interactions that ‘meaning’ is dynamically created by the process of ‘double hermeneutics’ and by extension records generated. For dialogue to take place within such a dialectic, information systems must be both trusted and trustworthy - ‘With the development of abstract systems, trust in impersonal principles, as well as in anonymous others, becomes indispensable to social existence.’¹² Although Michael eschews, I suspect deliberately, such language, he returns repeatedly to the relationship between those who only leave shallow footprints on the face of history and the powerful who bequeath abundant archives. He cites Australians’ innate dislike of self-aggrandisement and an overbearing government that has its roots firmly in the English Civil War.

Like Carl Becker in his famous – and to some infamous – presidential address to the American Historical Association in 1931, Michael champions the notion of ‘everyone their own archivist’ in his penetrating essay on Percy Grainger in Chapter 13.¹³ He devotes much of his eschatological musings on the afterlife to personal recordkeeping, while ignoring the other balls he has happily hit over the boundary on his journey for us to find in the long grass (Epilogue). This is where, as Alexander Stille reminded us, the Internet and social networking is making such an enormous impact and much of it is happening despite us and despite the academy. To some this is anathema, to others it is more than welcome. The flip side of the dialectic is the way in which those in power construct the image of their lives and deliberately cloak themselves in a mythology that suits their purpose, explored in the wonderfully funny account, tinged with bathos, of Bob Hawke and the lily pond in Chapter 5.

I recently had dinner with someone who had been private secretary to one of Margaret Thatcher’s ministers and I was surprised that they deliberately encouraged the ‘lady’s not for turning’ image so that when they introduced more moderate legislation than expected it was applauded and passed without comment. Such behaviour raises doubts in both my mind and the other Michael’s about claims archivists make about objectivity and the dark art of ‘appraisal’ with little thought for the ‘ruthless men’ and women for that matter (Chapter 11). As Mary Mitford warned us in her delightful Our Village published in 1828, these self-constructed grandees – ‘the stiff cravat, the pinched-in waist, the dandy walk – oh they will never do for cricket. Now our country lads, accustomed to the flail or the hammer … have the free use of their arms; they know how to move their shoulders; and they can move their feet too – they can run.’

It is the stories of such country lads that intrigues Michael and can often surprise us in the way they bisect the lives of the famous. As children we were entertained every Christmas by the charming Misses Thrush, small delicate ladies who taught the piano; but they were astonishingly the nieces of the great and enormous Dr W.G. Grace and the house was discreetly full of his memorabilia and they in turn of stories about the cricketing achievements of their famous uncle. We sat goggle-eyed as we were told how their uncle with his dog as fielder had beaten the Gloucestershire eleven. There can be little doubt that the affordances the Internet provides for individuals to tell the stories they research and assemble is transforming the way we think about archives. Without it I would never have known that the bulk of my radical family emigrated freely to Australia in the mid-nineteenth century.¹⁴ Michael is right to end with the personal.

If it is puzzling that archivists will not go to Nineveh and prefer to remain with Jonah among the rhubarb, it is even more puzzling to both of us as to why so few historians trouble to come to see us in our rhubarb patches to use archives. Michael lays the blame partly at the door of the archivists and the collapse in the relationship with historians. It is fashionable to attribute this in large measure to Jenkinson, but in his valedictory lecture at University College London Jenkinson said nothing of the kind:

[The Archivist] will almost certainly make from time to time interesting discoveries and must sometimes be allowed the pleasure of following them up, in off hours, himself. The appropriate motto seems to be, if I may vary the metaphor, ‘Thou shalt not muzzle the ox that treadeth out the corn.’¹⁵

A more likely explanation is, as Michael suggests, the reification of the ‘Archive’, if I can be permitted a Jenkinsonian capital, combined with a mindless managerialism that pervades the curatorial profession and on the historians’ side, at least in the United Kingdom, a collapse of what used to be called courses in sources and methods, despite the fact that nearly all history programmes now include a mandatory dissertation. The need for a reconnection is a powerful undercurrent running through these essays. Michael’s face is turned relentlessly towards history and the historian in a way that is both salutary and refreshing. What he has in mind is not historische, but what the Germans call Geschichte, a study of the past that transcends the human sciences. In the cause he supported to preserve records of Australian business, an endeavour that occupied much of my early career on the other side of the world, the historian hardly features (Chapter 10). I was luckier, but only the exceptional business historian grapples with the complexity of accounting records that dominate such holdings. They prefer the quiet waters of press-cutting books.

Similarly in the defence of collecting archives, mostly within universities, the historian is cast as an admiring beneficiary of archival ‘alchemy’ and not as a figure on the barricades, apart from R.H. Tawney in his ‘stout pair of boots’. He would have been more use than most, as he would have had his sniper’s rifle. It is a little known fact that he was among the most accurate snipers on the Western Front. From my perspective archivists and historians often talk past each other, because few historians have the confidence to paint as wide a canvas and engage with theory as Michael does in these essays. This is almost certainly because unlike archivists, who are expected to be experts on the whole range of their holdings, historians to advance their careers specialise narrowly and can be accused of being even more solipsistic than archivists.

Now let me turn to orality – a theme which Michael does not add to his eschatological charge to those he leaves behind but to my mind is central to the encounter between cultures with a written and oral tradition such as Australia. It is one that dominates any discussion of colonial recordkeeping and administration and deserves much more attention. If as we now know from the discovery of written evidence from the Neolithic period there is only a tenuous sequence from orality to a written culture, why is it some cultures embrace memorialisation through writing and others remain wedded to an oral tradition even in some parts of the world to this day?¹⁶ When Dr Banda took power in the newly independent Malawi, he deliberately returned to traditional orality so that he could avoid any form of audit and set himself above the rule of Western-style law with its reliance on written evidence. We can even see the same tendencies in the West to avoid freedom of information requests.

This is a complex question that demands a transnational and a transdisciplinary response. Michael addresses orality in Chapter 16 from a largely diachronic perspective, which in the light of European occupation with its long tradition of written culture, is understandable. We need comparative studies and we can now deliver these easily if we have the will by taking advantage of the affordances of the Internet. Michael asserts that the stick carriers bore the message in their heads and were both medium and message - long before McLuhan, but almost certainly those who carried Charlemagne’s sealed letters did not. In neither case do the messages survive, but we know they were carried. The preservation of the oral tradition in modern societies is also contested territory. Some look back to an imagined halcyon past while others argue that modernity is the only means of preservation: witness the number of Europeans who document the languages and even adopt the cultures of the lands they occupy. There is an elaborate exchange that the Princeton scholar D. Graham Burnett explores in: ‘what it means to possess land where one does not dwell’.¹⁷ In the United Kingdom and in Australia there is no better evidence of such exchange than in our gardens where plants bear witness to global connections even in inhospitable climes.

Exchange implies encounter and re-encounter, an endless coming and going of goods and people. For the emigrant communities in the twentieth century families in the United Kingdom rediscovered relations they had never expected to see again in the two great conflicts that marred the century. Not only did soldiers meet their relatives, but a vigorous correspondence about their welfare and fate reignited old ties. After the conflict it waned. This re-encounter is brilliantly described by John Buchan, like Bean an historian of the war, in his novel Castle Gay published in 1925. The novel opens with an account of a rugby match between a mighty Australian team of daunting physique and Scotland, in which the hero of the tale Wee Jaikie scores the winning try in the closing moments of the game:

… the Kangaroo was too slow in his tackle to meet Jaikie’s swerve. He retained indeed in his massive fist a considerable part of Jaikie’s jersey, but the half naked wearer managed to stumble on just ahead of him, and secured a try in the extreme corner.

As we have seen Michael draws attention to the centrality of this reconnection symbolised by the Australian War Memorial in the country’s memory-making. The same is true in the United Kingdom. I can well recall being taken by grandmother as a small boy to see my grandfather’s name in the book of remembrance in the Scottish National War Memorial in Edinburgh Castle. We stayed with my great uncle her brother-in-law, a gentle and kindly Church of Scotland minister, who as children we were never told had been a conscientious objector and, a mere teenager, a stretcher bearer throughout the war on the Western Front.

The response to such unthinkable horror or that of the decimation of the native population of Australia described by Michael is strangely the catharsis of humour, which Robert Evans brilliantly explored in his recent valedictory from the Regius Chair of History at Oxford.¹⁸ As he asserts: ‘Even the most dreadful events, that is to say, have some kind of comic dimension, which may actually help us grasp and assimilate them.’ Throughout these essays there is humour, not cheap jibes to wake a slumbering audience, but a bubbling humour that catches you unawares and leaves you thinking. Robert Evans concludes his lecture by quoting Hugh Trevor Roper’s own valedictory: ‘History is what happened in the context of what might have happened … [T]he imagination of the historian … will discern hidden forces of change.’ We might in Michael’s case substitute archivist for historian and our collections and our thoughtful reflection on what we are about will be the richer for it.

¹Reprinted in Roger Ellis and Peter Walne (eds), Selected Writings of Sir Hilary Jenkinson (Gloucester: Alan Sutton, 1980), p. 339.

²Alexander Stille, The Future of the Past - How the Information Age Threatens to Destroy our Cultural Heritage (New York: Farrar Straus & Giroux, 2002), p. 330.

³Running the Show. The Extraordinary Stories of the Men who Governed the British Empire (London: Viking, 2011).

⁴See, for example, the National Archives, Kew (TNA) T190/90 G.R. Hamilton, ‘The Treasury Registry’, 1 December 1919, and TNA FO366/787 report of committee on the reorganization of Foreign Office Registries, 14 November 1918.

⁵Anthony Trollope, The Three Clerks (London: Bentley, 1858).

⁶Trollope, The Three Clerks.

⁷History of the Ministry of Munitions (London: HMSO, 1920–2). The files are now preserved in TNA in the MUN series.

⁸TNA, CAB 21/2387, memorandum A.G. Banks to Colonel Ives, 1937.

⁹See, for example, Tom Bingham, The Rule of Law (London: Allen Lane, 2010).

¹⁰Michael Moss, ‘Is it a question of trust or why are we afraid to go to Nineveh?’, Archival Science (2011) 11 (3–4): 409–25.

¹¹Anthony Giddens, The Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of Structuration (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1984), p. 283.

¹²Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity. (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990), p. 120.

¹³Carl Becker, ‘Everyman his own historian’, American Historical Review (1932) 37 (2): 221–36.

¹⁴Michael Moss, ‘Choreographed encounter - the archive and public history’, Archives (2007) xxxii (116): 41–57.

¹⁵Ellis and Walne, Selected Writings of Sir Hilary Jenkinson, p. 258.

¹⁶J.C. Mitchell, The Yao Village: A Study in the Social Structure of a Malawian Tribe (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1956).

¹⁷Masters of All They Surveyed: Exploration, Geography, and a British El Dorado (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2000), p. 264.

¹⁸‘The humour of history and the history of humour’, Oxford Historian (2011) ix: 44–58.

Acknowledgements

A book which includes earlier work inevitably means that there are many people due thanks. To list them all is not an option, even if I had perfect recall.

Because they were so pivotal over my career, however, three people simply must be named. Firstly there is Bob Sharman, my lecturer in the early 1970s in the University of Canberra’s single elective unit Archives and Manuscripts. Only later did I come to properly appreciate his pioneering career achievements and the significance of his professional contributions. Second is one of my first supervisors, the National Library’s Manuscripts Librarian, Graeme Powell. He challenged and pushed me, and largely by example stressed there was a serious scholarly curatorship element to the management of manuscripts. Finally there is Professor Sue McKemmish, justifiably recognised internationally as Australia’s most eminent academic archivist. She was the first colleague I knew who agreed there was something fascinating and important about personal recordkeeping behaviour, and that literature and biography could reveal its many patterns and styles.

These aside, because career involvements and related professional interests form the background to this book, I thank for support at critical moments Dr Michael McKernan at the Australian War Memorial, George Nichols at the National Archives of Australia and Professors David Merrett and Warren Bebbington at the University of Melbourne. I also gained invaluable experience in two earlier writing projects working with Sue McKemmish to produce The Records Continuum (1994) and with Sue and co-editors Barbara Reed and Frank Upward to produce Archives: Recordkeeping in Society (2005).

Many friends and colleagues supported this book with encouragement, research, the loan of articles and suggestions and comments on particular chapters. Accordingly I thank Professor Jeannette Bastian, Linda Bell, Anne-Marie Condé, Adrian Cunningham, Grace Koch, Dr Sigrid McCausland, Colleen McEwen, Dr David Pear, Dr Bob Pymm, Dr John Robertson, Dr Joanna Sassoon, Maggie Shapley, Andrew Stephenson, Dr Jim Stokes and Dr Paul Wilson.

When the book idea was still taking shape, Dr Peter Wosh at the Society of American Archivists, and that true stalwart, Dr Terry Cook, were both encouraging and understanding. At Chandos, the Publisher Dr Glyn Jones was immediately supportive and Editorial Assistant George Knott, Commissioning Editor Jonathan Davis and freelance editor Peter Williams were always helpful. I also want to thank indexer Barry Howarth, a genuine quiet achiever.

Dr Peter Stanley at the National Museum of Australia must definitely be mentioned. The invitation to enjoy a year’s hospitality in 2011 as an Honorary Associate at his Centre for Historical Research brought with it numerous benefits. I had access to scholars of indigenous Australian history such as Dr Mike Smith, Dr Michael Pickering and Dr Darrell Lewis, to a wider group of curators and historians, to its wonderful library run so efficiently by ‘the two Ns’, Noellen Newton and Naomi Newton, and the collegiality of the Centre’s Wednesday morning teas.

For permissions and help with photos I thank Astrid Krautschneider (Grainger Museum), David Swift (National Archives of Australia), Katie Wood and Helen McLaughlin (University of Melbourne Archives), Ross Latham (Tasmanian Archive and Heritage Office), Bob Sharman, Dr Brian McMullin (Ancora Press), Dr Bob Pymm ( Australian Academic & Research Libraries), Katherine Gallen (Australian Society of Archivists), Dr Lenore Coltheart ( Current Affairs Bulletin), Alana Adams (Australian National University Heritage Office), Margaret Procter (Comma), Maggie Shapley (ANU Archives), David Walker (LINC Tasmania), Richard White (Australian Historical Association) and Professor W. Boyd Rayward (University of New South Wales).

Separate special mention of two others is warranted: firstly Professor Michael Moss, who at short notice agreed to introduce the book and who understood immediately what I was trying to say; secondly, Stephen Yorke, who heroically read the entire manuscript and provided numerous suggestions helping to strip cholesterol from my paragraphs, to anticipate readers’ questions and generally to strengthen my conclusions.

Finally, I thank my constant and true friend Anne. She was supportive and patient and tolerant during this project, as with so many others. She never despaired over my tendency to fill sentences with lists, and she never minded me reading while she was trying to sleep.

About the author

Michael Piggott is a retired archivist based in Canberra, Australia, who works as a researcher and consultant. He has separate postgraduate qualifications in librarianship, archives and history, is an Adjunct Lecturer with Charles Sturt University School of Information Studies, and is currently engaged with several writing and other projects. These include the chair of the Australian Society of Archivists’ 2013 annual conference committee, a research guide for the National Archives of Australia, a review article for reCollections on the National Library’s Treasures gallery and a refereed article for Australian Academic and Research Libraries titled ‘Archival guides and the National Archives of Australia’.

His professional career spanned the National Library of Australia, the Australian War Memorial, the National Archives of Australia and the University of Melbourne. His final combined role there was University Archivist and Manager, Cultural Collections Group, coordinating a programme covering 32 university collections including Baillieu Library rare books and the Grainger Museum.

He has been involved with the archives literature, profession and sector for 40 years, and has published widely in refereed archival science journals, textbooks and anthologies. He is a Laureate of the Australian Society of Archivists, a three-time recipient of its Mander Jones Award and a former editor of its journal Archives and Manuscripts, having served for many years on its Editorial Board. In the mid-1980s he received a Commonwealth Public Service Board scholarship to undertake further archives study, has a 1996 Doreen Goodman Award from the University of Canberra, led an ARC-funded project on web access to trade union archives which in 2002 won a Sir Rupert Hamer Records Management award, and in his final year at Melbourne received a Vice Chancellor’s Knowledge Transfer Excellence Award.

On retirement in late 2008 he was awarded an Australian Prime Ministers Centre fellowship to locate relevant documents on prime ministers in the Australian National University Archives. In 2010 he was invited to be an Honorary Associate of the National Museum of Australia’s Centre for Historical Research and an Honorary Member of the Centre for Organisational and Social Informatics, Monash University. His consultancies have included projects for the New Zealand National Archives, Charles Sturt University, the University of Melbourne and the University of Adelaide, a large regional cultural heritage organisation and a national religious institution.

The author may be contacted via the publishers.

1

Introduction: societal provenance

Abstract.

The chapter explains, after a consideration of alternatives such as archival terroir, why Tom Nesmith’s articulation of societal provenance is the preferred framework for a focus on the distinctiveness of the Australian archives and records landscape. The question of terminology is also discussed, as are terms and phrases such as Australia and the Australian people. The challenge of applying societal provenance to an entire society is noted, together with the structure of the ensuing chapters (history, institutions, formation and debates).

Keywords

Tom Nesmith

societal provenance

Australian archives and records

… records have what might be called a societal provenance.

Associate Professor Tom Nesmith, Archival Science (2006)

Imagine someone wanted to gain a sense of the Australian archives and records scene, past and present. What could we recommend they consult for its history, services, practices, legislation and institutional arrangements and theoretical achievements? Something too which conveyed the wider cultural contexts. Once, long ago, for archives as heritage at least, the answer was obvious.¹ Now, much of the information for a modern summary is scattered and incomplete.²

Archives and Societal Provenance is aimed at helping answer that need, and also looks to identify something of our distinctiveness. It is a blend of new writing, previous publications and addresses, and reorganised combinations of earlier work. If evidence of my mending has remained visible, your tolerance is appreciated. What follows are not research reports but addresses and essays, and include several which are argumentative, personal and reflective. Where appropriate, each chapter’s first paragraph or first endnote provides details of original publication.

Wanting to direct attention to the historical and societal setting of the Australian archives and records landscape is one thing, but how would it be grounded in a generalised framework? The same need would be there if we tried to make sense of the fact that at least ten Right-to-Information activists were murdered in India 2010, or of the fact that during dhanteras, the first day of the Diwali festival, Hindu businessmen in India and elsewhere will have their new ledger books blessed.³ ‘Archives are specific to the country, organization, social or other grouping or individual from which they derive,’ wrote Sarah Tyacke, the former Keeper of Public Records in 2007.⁴ While no one would deny the growing phenomenon of global recordkeeping, this surely is a safe generalisation, true of the English-speaking world and probably beyond.

Terroir, culture and the individual

Dissatisfied with simple relativism, my first thought was the idea of archival terroir.⁵ Might archives be nourished by the quality of a particular society just as a master vigneron makes wine which distils the quality of a particular location, tradition, climate, geology and geography? Every element involved in wine production (grape varieties, vine pruning, appellation d’origine contrôlée, authenticity, technology) supports terroir as a powerful archival metaphor. It links nicely with the words of war historian C.E.W. Bean quoted in Chapter 8: ‘Here is their spirit, in the heart of the land they loved, and here we guard the record which they themselves made.’ It connects with the agricultural beginnings of Sumerian recordkeeping. And it fits with the deep orally held ties indigenous peoples have with the land, with country.

A second option would have been to focus just on the human person as a self-documenter, as the subject of dossiers and personal recordkeeping within particular cultural settings. This would align with a long-standing personal interest as well as with the sense in which all recordkeeping behaviour, including corporate, is personal. Eric Ketelaar among others has championed the human angle. Noting France’s inclination for personal registration and the styling of illegal immigrants as ‘les sanspapiers’, he has called for research ‘in other countries and cultures … examining the archivalisation that determines how people create their own archives’(1999).⁶

Another option again would be to settle on definitions of culture and Australian culture – no simple matter – and, following many earlier thinkers, explore records and archives as a cultural product and manifestation.⁷ There is also the complementary notion of a recordkeeping culture, usually applied to corporate settings.⁸ The additional challenge would then be demonstrating how archival phenomena such as institutions, systems, practices and terminology are shaped by the historical, political, intellectual and economic contexts (in short, cultural contexts) distinctive to their production. All this serves to remind us of those who argue traditional understandings of provenance are too narrow: that a record’s immediate context of creation and use resides within still wider layers of organisational, psychological, family, cultural and historical provenance.

The aura of societal provenance

The concept which anchors this book is Tom Nesmith’s articulation of societal