Review of 'Private lives revealed: letters, diaries,
history'
National Library of Australia seminar, 23 March 1996.
Our professional response to letters and diaries can be located somewhere between two extremes. At one end is a breathless reverence for the original document, often listed in disaster plans or among an archives' or library's 'treasures' and accorded iconic status, gloved handling and vault storage. This is derided as a 'jewel box' or museum mentality at the other extreme, where the personal papers of which they theoretically once formed a part are ignored because fundamentally they are no different from all other records (thus discouraging research into other kinds of difference) or sent to a professional Coventry because either they are not really records or because the 'hunters and gatherers' who vacuum them up are not really archivists.
Such polarity has its secular equivalent. The autograph collector perhaps best represents one extreme, a position shared with those who romanticise about the golden days of correspondence, fountain pens, decent stationery and three postal deliveries per day. At the other are the likes of Sir Robert Menzies who hoped his executors would 'use the incinerator freely' on his papers, and biographies (for example Alan Frost's life of Arthur Phillip) which still come alive despite the absence of the subject's papers.
Elements of middle ground of both spectrums were brought to mind at a recent half-day seminar organised by the National Library of Australia. It featured academics Chris Tiffin and Peter Read, independent scholars Patricia Clarke and Ann Moyal, the biographer and broadcaster David Marr and the Library's John Thompson. Each dealt with an aspect of the advertised theme, and with exception of Read, succeeded in addressing to some degree at least letters and diaries.
Strictly speaking the seminar should have had little interest for an archivist. No archivist spoke-though a former manuscripts librarian John Thompson described, with some moving illustrations, the anthology of Australian letters he is co-compiling for OUP. No strong appreciation of letters and diaries as records and of individuals as recordkeepers came through, for the focus was deliberately and understandably on the former as historical sources and the latter as writers of communication (and arguably as authors of a genre of literature).
Themes of archival importance nevertheless did surface. Almost every speaker commented on the challenges of hunting down material, and much of Marr's discussion traversed familiar 'privacy versus access' ground. His plea for a tougher stand by libraries against donors stipulating lengthy access restrictions was nicely illustrated by the release the previous week by the Mitchell Library of several hundred Henry Handel Richardson letters after a (to Marr) patently unwarranted fifty year closure. There were also moments when, given a different audience, issues of recordness, impartiality and context could have been brought out in relation to letters and diaries. Chris Tiffin's exploration of a letter writer's sense of audience was especially suggestive, and one looks forward to seeing the formal version of his presentation in the National Library's quarterly journal Voices.
For the rest, the speakers and the audience reflected on the meaning of and attitudes towards privacy and discussed how biographers, literary scholars and others should or should not use letters and diaries as historical evidence. My one disappointment was the lack of a conclusion to the seminar. Ian Templeman had opened proceedings in a most engaging way, weaving in a quote from Elizabeth Jolly about how letters 'reveal oneself to oneself' and closing by briefly recalling each speaker's paper. I was left wondering what whole the sum of these parts, interesting though they were, amounted to. Perhaps this is unfair, because in half a day the multilayered relationship between private lives and personal documentation can hardly even be introduced. An entire day for example could be devoted to how such private and highly personal material as patients' therapy journals, rape counsellors' notes and Congressmen's diaries can get caught up in litigation involving charges of malpractice or sexual harassment.
Perhaps the best measure of success with these seminars is what mental aftershocks they trigger. For me, a favourite perennial which asks exactly what is it that we archivists are meant to be experts in resurfaced in the face of all that scholarly analysis of the cultural, literary and psychological facets of letters and diaries. I wondered too how an equivalent seminar held by my own organisation would be billed: 'Private Lives Revealed-minutes, logbooks, history', or more realistically'...ASIO dossiers, e-mail intercepts, history'? And in my vision of a perfect world there are another eighty Canberrans paying another $50 each to devote most of their Saturday to hear archivists discuss 'Personal recordkeeping systems and the average Australian-photo albums, tax returns, history'.
Michael Piggott
Australian Archives
Review published in Archives and Manuscripts 1996, Vol. 24(1), 198-200. Reproduced here with permission of the author, who retains copyright.
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