Archives: Recordkeeping in Society

others.

Chapter 1

Traces: Document, record, archive, archives

Sue McKemmish

All events have their witness, their memory: the trace.¹

Writing is one of the representatives of the trace in general; it is not the trace itself The trace itself does not exist.²

And when we write, when we archive, when we leave a trace behind us − and that’s what we do each time we trace something, even each time we speak, that is we leave a trace which becomes independent of its origin, of the movement of its utterance − the trace is at the same time the memory, the archive, and the erasure, the repression, the forgetting of what it is supposed to keep safe.³

For novelist Graham Swift man is quintessentially ‘the storytelling animal’, leaving behind ‘not a chaotic wake, not an empty space, but the comforting marker-buoys and trail-signs of stories’.⁴ Sociologist Anthony Giddens talks about how our very identity is bound up with the capacity to sustain a ‘narrative of self’, integrating external events into the ongoing story of a life.⁵

A narrative of self or the stories people tell may never be written down or documented, but for some people a diary or a journal is an indispensable part of keeping their personal story going, and exchanging letters or emails can be critical to the ‘process of mutual disclosure’ that Giddens sees as a feature of intimate relationships in the modern age. Janet Malcolm describes love letters as ‘fixatives of experience’, ‘fossils of feeling’, proof that ‘once we cared’.⁶ Richard Holmes, biographer of Robert Louis Stevenson, Shelley, Coleridge and others, gives a fascinating insight into the nature of such ‘biographical evidence’ when he discusses how the individual subject of the biography can only be captured − brought alive in the present − through placing them in relationship to other people. He describes how he went about exploring how Stevenson ‘fitted into the enormously intricate emotional web of other people’s lives’:

Stevenson existed very largely in, and through, his contact with other people; his books are written for his public; his letters for his friends, even his private journal is a way of giving social expression − externalizing − his otherwise inarticulated thoughts. It is in this sense that all real biographical evidence is witnessed …⁷

Extending beyond the individual, Edmund White, in writing about the AIDS epidemic and its devastating effect on the gay community, not only on individual lives, but on an entire culture, highlighted the need to ‘bear witness to the cultural moment’.⁸

Throughout time individuals and societies have communicated, captured and passed on many of their stories by selectively storing, structuring, and re-presenting them − graphically, textually, on some kind of media and using whatever technology is available to them − the chalk on the cave wall, the carving on the monolith, the paint on the clay pot or the mummy case, the handwriting on the scroll, the sound recording on the CD, the bits on the computer disk, the image on the film. Other stories are remembered by being told, sung, danced or performed, captured in rituals and ceremonies, recalled and retold or performed again.

The urge to witness, to memorialize, has its dark counterpart in ‘killing the memory’, the acts of ‘memoricide’ that have occurred throughout history, such as the targeting of museums, archives and cultural institutions which accompanied ethnic cleansing in Bosnia and elsewhere. Derrida has reflected extensively on the notion of the death drive in archiving in Archive Fever.⁹ He has also explored how it is at work in two ways in the shaping of the archive of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa − in the drive by the former apartheid regime on the one hand to destroy memory in a way that no archive, no trace of the murder and violence is left, and, on the other, in the Commission’s desire to witness, to record the testimony, to accumulate the archive and keep it safe. For Derrida archiving in the sense of inscribing a trace in some location, external to living memory, is an act of forgetting that carries with it the possibility of deferred remembering. And it is because the radical drive to destroy memory without trace is always also in play that ‘the desire for archive is a burning one’:

If there is a passion, it is because we know that not only the traces can be lost by accident or because the space is finite or the time is finite, but because we know that something in us, so to speak, something in the psychic apparatus, is driven to destroy the trace without reminder. And that’s where the archive fever comes from.¹⁰

In most groups and societies there are people whose special role it is to look after our memory stores, the places where what Derrida terms the archiving trace is inscribed, and to recall, retell or re-present our stories on behalf of the group. Archivists as society’s recordkeeping professionals are part of this larger community. Linked to the different natures, purposes and functionalities of the various forms of recorded information, different professional communities of practice have evolved to manage record stores, archives, libraries, museums, galleries, and historic sites on our behalf.

In this book we are concerned with the nature, purposes and functionalities of a particular form of recorded information, documentary traces of social and organizational activity, that are accumulated and managed by recordkeeping and archiving processes as record, archive and archives. We explore recordkeeping and archiving as a form of witnessing and memory making, a particular way of evidencing and memorializing our individual and collective lives −’our existence, our activities and experiences, our relationships with others, our identity, our ‘ place’ in the world’.¹¹

The meanings behind the use of the terms record, archive and archives are as many and varied as the discourses in which they appear − from the very broadest sense of the word archive encompassing oral and written records, literature, landscape, dance, art, the built environment, and artefacts to the more precise and applied meanings used by recordkeeping professional communities:

If we look at what we can say differently from others, then as a professional group with a professional knowledge of recordkeeping objects, we should be able to make statements about the interplay between recordkeeping objects and their evidential qualities, the identity of those who created them, and the social and business processes that brought them into being.¹²

In the rest of this chapter, we explore the meanings of the terms documents, record, archive and archives from this perspective. Woven throughout our exploration is the elusive nature of the trace itself in its evocation of the past in the present.

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So, let us begin with a story.

In the two years leading up to the Australian federal election on 10 November 2001 the Australian government had been waging a campaign against boat people, refugees or asylum seekers mainly from Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan who tried to reach Australia by boat, and the people smugglers who ran the boat trade. From the early 1990s, the increasing numbers of boat people and their children were treated as illegal immigrants and detained in remote desert camps, in breach of a number of United Nations conventions, while their refugee claims were processed. This is in marked contrast to the treatment of the much larger numbers arriving by air, who are generally released into the community while their claims are heard:

The problem for boat people was always the boat: the symbol of Australia’s old fears of invasion. People worried far less − indeed, hardly at all − about asylum seekers arriving by air, even though they were jumping the same queue, there were far more of them and they were about half as likely as those who came by sea to be genuine refugees.¹³

In late August 2001, against a background of growing numbers of boat people arriving in Australia, increasing unrest and disturbances in the detention camps, and the emergence of a new anti-immigration right wing political party, a Norwegian container ship, the Tampa, rescued 438 people from a sinking Indonesian boat. Captain Arne Rinnan, later to receive a United Nations Refugee Award for his commitment to refugee protection, was threatened with heavy fines and jail for people smuggling by the Australian government if he did not turn back to Indonesia, but for the safety of his crew and the people he had rescued, he decided that the only option he had was to go on to the Australian territory of Christmas Island, the closest port. On arrival offshore, the Tampa was refused permission to enter the port. There followed days of stalemate, the occupation of the Tampa by Australian soldiers from an elite SAS unit, and the eventual transfer of the refugees on an Australian naval ship to a camp set up for them by the government of Nauru.

Figure 1.1 The Australian territory of Christmas Island lies about 380 km south of Java and 1500 km from the Australian mainland.

In response to the Tampa crisis, the Australian government put in place Operation Relex, a naval blockade of the Indian Ocean to turn back any more refugee boats heading towards Australian waters. Operation Relex was directed from Canberra by a People Smuggling Taskforce, and special arrangements were put in place to ensure information flowed between naval ships involved in the blockade, Taskforce personnel and government ministers and their staff, much of it by word of mouth, rather than more formal written communications. At the same time, strict controls on the release of any military information to the public were put in place − all communication with the media was to be cleared via the Defence Minister’s office. As these plans were being finalized, the nature of the threat the boat people posed to Australia was about to be redefined by the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

Thus the scene was set for the interception on 6 October by HMAS Adelaide of an Indonesian boat, the Olong, also known as SIEV 4 (Suspected Illegal Entry Vessel). SIEV 4 was overloaded with 223 refugees, including many children, and it was about to sail ‘into Australian political history’.¹⁴

The story of what happened on the following days has been meticulously reconstructed by investigative journalists Marr and Wilkinson from documents that resulted from the social and organizational activities associated with the events that unfolded on 6-8 October and their aftermath. Accumulated in the records of HMAS Adelaide are the ship’s logs, operation reports, videotapes of events, the videotape operator’s logbook, email communications back to headquarters, the chronology of events based on the Adelaide’s signals, and still photographs. There is also the ‘oral record’ of telephone calls and other communications, remembered or diarized, and retold to later inquiries. There are documents accumulated in the records of the Defence Strategic Command, Maritime Headquarters and Northern Command released to the media under FOI, and the documentary evidence submitted to the later inquiries conducted by the military and the Parliament, together with their transcripts of testimony, and of course the media reports.

Commander of the Adelaide, Norman Banks, had orders to stop SIEV 4 reaching Christmas Island. On 7 October warning shots were fired, and, as a boarding party took control and turned the boat around, there was trouble with the engines, and another boatload of sailors was sent over from the Adelaide. In the ensuing chaos, some refugees jumped overboard, others threatened ‘to destroy the boat and commit suicide or throw their children overboard if they could not reach Australia’:

Water was streaming over the decks … Suddenly, some of the officers spotted a small girl about five years old in a pink jumper being carried by her father to the top of the wheelhouse. He … held her over the side gesturing to the sailors in the [boat] below to take her. Watching from the bridge [of the Adelaide] Banks was stunned. He thought the father was about to drop the child.¹⁵

At this critical stage, Banks took a call from a superior officer in Darwin, Brigadier Silverstone. In testimony to subsequent inquiries into this incident, Banks recalled saying that some of the refugees were jumping and threatening to throw their children into the water, while Silverstone reported hurriedly writing notes in his diary, including: ‘Men thrown over side. 5, 6 or 7’, and, after the call ended, ‘Silverstone added the word ‘child’ to the note believing, he would say later, that Commander Banks told him a child about 5, 6 or 7 years old had been thrown over the side.’ The message relayed by telephone back to the People Smuggling Taskforce meeting in Canberra was that people were jumping overboard and throwing their children into the water:

The image of children being thrown overboard grabbed the attention of the bureaucrats because it confirmed the warnings they had been given − determined boat people would go to any lengths to play on the Australian navy’s obligations to rescue drowning people at sea. ¹⁶

Although there was nothing in the written operation reports thus far received from the Adelaide to back up the children overboard claim, during the meeting on 7 October, a fourth-hand version of the story was conveyed by mobile phone by a member of the Taskforce to the Minister of Immigration, who was about to go into a media briefing. He repeated the story to the press, and then rang the Prime Minister and Defence Minister to brief them on his comments, and later that night the Chair of the Taskforce confirmed the story in a report faxed to both Ministers. ‘The ‘Children Overboard’ story was off and running’ and the demonization of the boat people had begun.

Later the next day, 8 October, the Olong was sinking, with men, women and children jumping into the sea as water rose over the bow:

From the second deck of the Adelaide, Able Seaman Laura Whittle saw a mother struggling in the choppy water with her young child. Without even waiting to put on her life jacket, Whittle dived twelve metres into the sea to haul the frightened pair to a life raft. Nearby, her mate, Leading Cook Jason Barker, was swimming out to a terrified father and child. Scores of passengers, supported by life jackets, bobbed in the water surrounded by debris as the Adelaide’s crew scrambled to get the 223 men, women and children clear of the sinking boat… It was a miraculous rescue …

In the early hours of the [next] morning, the Adelaide’s communications room sent out a series of photographs on its secret email system, recording an unforgettable day in the lives of the crew, 8 October 2001. Two of the photos, captioned ‘Courage’ and ‘Courage and Determination’, pictured Able Seaman Laura Whittle and her mate, Leading Cook Jason ‘Dogs’ Barker, in their brave rescue of two stricken asylum seekers and their children …¹⁷

Figure 1.2 The Children Overboard’ story on page 1 of The Age, 11 October 2001. Questions about the context and detail of both the photo and the story were raised immediately, but were not answered until months later.

The photographs were accompanied by an emailed commentary by the photographer about the courage and determination of the sailors involved in rescuing the passengers from the Olong on 8 October, as typified by Whittle and Barker.

The following photographs (which show children in the water) were takon during the sinking, but later came to be misrepresented as providing evidence in support of the reports of children being thrown overboard on 7 October.

Figure 1.3 Extracts from Investigation into advice provided to Ministers on ‘ SIEV 4 ’ (Bryant Report), Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, January 2002

Meanwhile the press was demanding evidence to support the Children Overboard story. Although one of the Minister for Defence’s senior advisers had been advised by telephone by a senior naval officer that there was no evidence in written reports, eyewitness accounts or the ship’s video to support the story, a few days later the Minister for Defence released the photographs of the rescue on 8 October during a radio interview, claiming that they depicted children who had been thrown into the water on 7 October, the day before the boat sank, and stating that he had been told that there was also video of the incident: ‘I am told that someone has looked at it and it is an absolute fact, children were thrown into the water’.¹⁸ At the request of the Minister for Defence’s press secretary, the photographs in question had been sent to the Minister without their captions, dates and accompanying commentary. They were thereafter shown on television and published in the newspapers with commentary and headlines indicating that they had been taken on 7 October. Many military leaders and personnel, including the crew of HMAS Adelaide, senior bureaucrats, and ministerial advisers knew from the beginning that there was in fact no written evidence, eyewitness accounts or first-hand oral records to support the Children Overboard story, that the videotapes from the Adelaide did not show children being thrown overboard, and that the photographs released by the Minister were taken during the mass rescue on 8 October when the Olong was already sinking. Although they made notes in their diaries of telephone calls they had made and provided written advice to this effect, the fiction of the Children Overboard was maintained until after the 10 November election, and the Ministers involved still claim that they ‘were not told’,¹⁹ and the media controls relating to military information put in place during the Tampa crisis prevented military personnel from speaking to the press.

The documents at the heart of the Children Overboard story are the photographs, the proto-records, archival traces of an act or event. Such archival traces become records, in the sense used in the recordkeeping professional community, when they are stored by recordkeeping and archiving processes in ways which preserve their content and structure, link them to related documents, and record information about related social and organizational activities. Through these processes records come into being, and acquire their quality as evidence, both recording and shaping related events. Whether achieved by rudimentary accumulation processes or by highly formalized and systematic ones, documentary traces are incorporated into the record of an individual or organization by ‘placing’ them in relation to other documents that already form part of the record, and establishing their relationships to their contexts of creation, ongoing management and use, Recordkeeping systems capture the content of documents, re-present their structure, and link related documents together. They retain the information content and structure of records in reconstructible relations, and make audit trails about their subsequent management, access and use. As more archival traces are incorporated into the record, more documentary and contextual links and relationships are captured and documented, Recordkeeping systems thereby enable records to be retrieved at a later date in a form that re-presents their original content and structure, exposes their documentary relationships, and reflects their multiple contexts of creation, ongoing management and use, thus preserving their evidentiary nature. The relationships amongst documents in a recordkeeping system or accumulation of records and between records and their contexts of creation, management and use are multiple and dynamic. From this perspective, records are ‘always in a state of becoming’.²⁰

Applying these understandings to the Children Overboard records, we can see how, if stored in the recordkeeping system of HMAS Adelaide with other documents relating to the ship’s role in Operation Relex, linked to contextual information about the events they document in the form of captions and dates, and attached to the sender’s copy of the email message that accompanied them, the photographs would come to form part of the records of HMAS Adelaide, and in that context they would function as evidence of the activities of the ship’s company during the rescue of the boat people. The transmitted copies of the photographs with their captions, dates and accompanying email, received and filed in the central Navy recordkeeping system in Canberra might come to form part of another record, the record of the Navy, evidence of the role of headquarters in monitoring the operation to intercept the Olong, Copies of the photographs kept by individual sailors with other photographs and personal documents in albums, diaries and scrapbooks, or sent in letters or via email to family and friends could become personal records, evidence in that context of individual lives.

Sir Hilary Jenkinson, Deputy Keeper of Public Records, UK, 1948

Archives are the documents accumulated by a natural process in the course of the Conduct of Affairs of any kind, Public or Private, at any date; and preserved thereafter for Reference, in their own Custody, by the persons responsible for the affairs in question or their successors.

(Hilary Jenkinson, ‘The English Archivist: A New Profession’, in Selected Writings of Sir Hilary Jenkinson, Gloucester, Alan Sutton, 1980, p. 237, originally published 1948)

Ian Maclean, Commonwealth Archives Office, Australia, 1962

We in Australia agree with Jenkinson when he states that ‘records’ and ‘archives’ are really the same thing … For my part I take the view that documents achieve ‘record’ or ‘archive’ status when they are made part of the record, whether they are eventually preserved permanently or not.

(Ian Maclean, ‘An Analysis of Jenkinson’s Manual of Archive Administration in the Light of Australian Experience’, reprinted in Peter Biskup et al., eds, Debates and Discourses: Selected Australian Writings on Archival Theory 1951-1990, Canberra, ASA Inc, 1995, p. 55)

David Bearman, 1993 – Archives as Recorded Transactions

Archives are recorded transactions created in the course of organizational activities that have continuing evidential value. The criteria which distinguish archives from all of the information ever created or received in an organization are that:

• archives are records of transactions

• archives document activities or functions reflected in the mission of the organization, not just incidental to it; and

• archives are retained for their continuing value as evidence.

The data of the record are the words, numbers, images, and sounds actually made by the creator of the record.

The structure of the record is the relationships among these data as employed by the record creator to convey meaning. One kind of structure is the stylistic formalisms which we use to recognize the ‘address’, ‘salutation’, or ‘body’ of written documents. Another kind of structure is the pointers between physically or logically distinct groupings of information …

The context of the record is the testimony it provides about the nexus of activity out of which it arose and in which it was used and about how it appeared and behaved in that setting.

(David Bearman, ‘Archival Principles and the Electronic Office’, in Angelika Menne-Haritz, ed., Information Handling in Offices and Archives, New York, K.G. Saur, 1993, pp. 177-193)

But what of the copies of the photographs, stripped of their captions and dates, and without the accompanying email, released by the Minister for Defence during a radio interview and subsequently published by the media in newspapers and television coverage? In one sense, these copies of the photographs became an information artefact, presented as evidence that the refugees threw their children overboard, but ultimately proved to be fake. However, during a critical decision-making time, this false re-presentation of an archival trace shaped an event that never happened. That event still exists insofar as the re-presentation of the trace, stripped of its context, and links to related documents, i.e. of its evidentiary qualities as part of the recording of an event, engendered the powerfully emotive construct of the children overboard. This construct was subsequently used to demonize and dehumanize the refugees on the boat, and their countrymen in Australia’s detention camps, and it lives on in our national psyche, helping to justify the treatment of the refugees and their children.²¹

In another sense, these copies of the photographs are archival traces of a different event altogether − that event being the manufacturing of evidence, the construction of an event that did not happen. If stored in the recordkeeping systems of the newspaper offices and television stations together with other documents relating to the gathering and dissemination of news stories about the refugees, and ‘master copies’ of related publications and broadcasts, these photographs would become records of the media companies, evidence of their broadcasting and publishing activities in relation to the Olong, Operation Relex and the election campaign. And if the copies of the photographs, stripped of captions and date, and without the accompanying email, were ever filed in the office of the Minister for Defence, there these archival traces would form part of the records of the Minister, evidence of his role in the affair.

Copies of the photographs from various recordkeeping systems, with and without their captions, dates and accompanying email message, were also submitted to the inquiries into the Children Overboard affair, including the Senate inquiry. If stored with the other records of the inquiry, the reports, exhibits, other documentary evidence, the oral records recalled and retold to the inquiries, and the transcripts of proceedings which captured oral testimony, these copies of the photographs would become part of yet another record, that of the organizations responsible for the various inquiries, evidence of the inquiry processes themselves.

McKemmish and Upward – The Archival Document (1990)

For anyone not familiar with the term, the archival document can best be conceptualized as recorded information arising out of transactions − it is created naturally in the course of transacting business of any kind, whether by governments, businesses, community organizations or private individuals. The recording of transactions may be in any storage media and is increasingly becoming an electronic process. The concept of the archival document is a common-place within European thought, but in Englis-speaking countries it is often confused with documents that have been selected for retention with in an archival institution. The lack of an adequate construct to explain the processes of creating and maintaining recorded information arising out of transactions with in English-speaking countries creates a distracting division within the record keeping profession between records managers, who look after current archival documents, and archivists, who look after our archival heritage which includes archival documents which have been selected for permanent retention. An understanding of the archival document which encompasses both current and historical documents directs attention to the continuum of processes involved in managing the record of a transaction from systems design to destruction or select preservation … Within this approach, documentation of a transaction is archival from the time the record is created and the archival document retains evidential value for as long as it is in existence … The archival document also re-presents the experience of the parties to the transaction which it records. It is more than recorded information. Those archival documents which are selected for permanent preservation become part of the archival heritage of a society, transmitting the accumulated experience of the transactions they document to future generations.

Effective creation and management of the archival document to ensure its integrity and validity is a precondition of an information-rich society and underpins public accountability on the part of both government and non-government organizations, FOI and privacy legislation, protection of people’s rights and entitlements, and the quality of the archival heritage.

(Sue McKemmish and Frank Upward, ‘The Archival Document: A Submission to the Inquiry into Australia as an Information Society’, Archives and Manuscripts, 19, no. 1, 1991, pp. 17-32; quote from pp. 19-22. This paper was originally prepared as a submission to the Inquiry into Australia as an Information Society in October 1990. McKemmish and Upward met with the Committee on 15 January 1991.)

What we are seeing so far in these examples is the operation of recordkeeping and archiving processes involved in transforming archival traces of the acts and events in which they participate into records which can function as evidence of those acts and events – by linking documents-as-trace to the transactions, acts, decisions or communications they document, the people, and related documents, and placing them in their immediate business or social context, as well as maintaining an audit trail of their management and use.

Beyond their immediate business and social contexts, records are transformed into a corporate or personal archive by recordkeeping and archiving processes that ‘place’ records-as-evidence in the broader context of the social and business activities and functions of the organization, group or individual, and manage them in frameworks that enable them to function as individual, group, or corporate memory.

To return to the records relating to the story of the Children Overboard, the various copies of the photographs, with or without captions and accompanying email, which form part of the Adelaide’s record of the interception of the Olong, or of Navy headquarters’ management of the Operation, the media organizations’ election coverage, the Minister’s Office’s handling of the affair, the individual sailor’s involvement, or the conduct of the specific inquiries also exist in the much broader contexts. Such contexts include all the different types of activities that the naval ship, the Navy, the Office of the Minister, the newspaper or television company, the individual or family, the committees of inquiry, or the Senate engage in. Together with the records of all these other activities, the records relating to the story of the Children Overboard would form the corporate or personal archive of the organization or individual concerned. For example, in the archive of HMAS Adelaide, they would be linked to other records of the ship’s involvement in Operation Relex and its other tours of duty − together with the ship’s logs, signals, operational reports, email system, and videotapes and logs, they constitute part of the ship’s corporate memory. Or, together with the other records of an individual sailor, they would become part of a personal archive, memorializing an individual