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NLA News - home March 2006 Volume XVI Number 6

A Rich Ground for Inquiry

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Section of storage area at the Berriedale Repository Photograph courtesy of Archives Office of Tasmania

 

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Section of the film vault at the Berriedale Repository Photograph courtesy of Archives Office of Tasmania

 

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Enquiry counter, Archives
Office Search Room
Photograph courtesy of
Archives Office of Tasmania

Christopher Bantick delves into the extensive resources of the Archives Office of Tasmania

The Archives Office of Tasmania, located in Murray Street, Hobart, seems an unlikely place for one of the most robustly fought and ongoing Australian historical debates of recent times. The building itself is modern with a certain architectural minimalist emphasis; it is as regular as a boxing ring.

With the publication of Keith Windshuttle’s The Fabrication of Aboriginal History: Volume One, Van Diemen’s Land, 1803–1847, the Archives Office of Tasmania was brought into the national spotlight. Windschuttle and eminent historian Professor Henry Reynolds—together with, but to a lesser extent, historian Lyndall Ryan—engaged in what became known as ‘the history wars’.

This conflict is largely centred on the way material in the Archives was used or misused. Footnotes were suddenly important for what they did or did not say. A cursory look at Windschuttle’s book reveals his extensive and detailed—if not forensic—trawling through the Archives Office’s holdings.

But the Archives (www.archives.tas.gov.au) has more to offer than ‘the history wars’. The Archives Office of Tasmania provides services which are increasingly sought both within Australia and internationally. Tasmania has in effect been discovered by writers and historians as being a rich ground for inquiry. At the centre of this explosion of interest over the last five years or so, is the Archives.

The Archives Office was established in Tasmania under the Public Records Act 1943. Its brief was clear. The office was to provide a formal and transparent framework for recordkeeping across Tasmania and local government organisations, and regulate the retention and disposal of their records.

More than this, the Archives Office was to provide facilities for the preservation of the state’s archives, including records of nongovernment organisations and individuals. In addition to the expectation of maintaining archives, the office was to enable public access to the material.

Besides the requirements of the Archives Act 1983, the Archives has facilitated the Tasmanian Archives Online database which contains descriptive information about the archives. There is also the provision of named indexes which index the contents of specific records.

In addition to accessing print documents, Tasmanian Archives Online has an index of the Archives’ extensive photographic holdings, which include copies of the images. There is also a database providing descriptive information about the Archives’ film and video holdings.

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Archives Office Search Room showing card index drawers, computers and microfilm readers
Photograph courtesy of Archives Office of Tasmania

Robyn Eastley is Senior Archivist for Reference Services in the Archives Office. She describes her role as being a conduit for researchers seeking material. ‘I am responsible for encouraging access to the collections, display of exhibitions and written inquiries. We still provide a limited service for those who are unable to visit the Archives themselves.’

The Archives Office’s undertaking to encourage more access to its material fortuitously coincided with the emergence of the ‘New Tasmania’ under the late former premier Jim Bacon. Through promotion of Tasmania as a place to visit, discovery of its early 19th-century historical buildings has led to a greater sense of wanting to know more about the past. Eastley says that encouraging wider access has been a significant success.

‘I think this has been to some extent prompted by the website. Once you start putting indexes to things people get interested. We have noticed more recently this has been with the index to wills. These date currently from 1824 to the 1970s and yet we have records up to the 1990s. People who have left Tasmania have been looking up great uncles and aunts, great grandparents and other family members through the wills index.

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View of Archives Office of Tasmania, 77 Murray Street, Hobart
Photograph courtesy of Archives Office of Tasmania

‘Their interest may not have been there at first but when they see their name on the index, they become involved and can get a copy of the will. There is a strong demand for this. It’s a self-preservation exercise in a way. ‘Once the wills were transferred to us from the probate office at the Supreme Court then people had to come to us for it. But with our contemporary index, they are easy to access. There was an expectation that we would search for it for those who couldn’t come but who needed the will.’

Apart from the Tasmanian Government requirement of formal recordkeeping across state and local government organisations, the Archives also receives deposits or donations from the private sector.

‘If people want to install their business, family or organisation’s records, then this can happen. In the case of the government records, they operate under legislation which requires them to check with us before they dispose of any records and also to transfer them to here on a regular basis. Most agencies shouldn’t—although there are some exceptions, like births, deaths and marriages—have records in their own custody for any more than 25 years old.’

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Homepage of the Archives Office of Tasmania
Courtesy of Archives Office of Tasmania
http://www.archives.tas.gov.au/

 

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Index to Wills and Letters of Administration from 1824, page from the website
Courtesy of Archives Office of Tasmania
http://portal.archives.tas.gov.au/
menu.aspx?search=9

The Archives are recognised as having one of the most complete sets of 19th-century convict records in existence. So how did the intact records become part of the holdings of the Archives?

‘We know the convict records were in the sheriff’s office in the vaults under Franklin Square, where the early Archives Office started up. The colonial secretary chief’s records were there, as were some of the newspapers. Other vaults scattered about Hobart held the records of the Supreme Court. We understand some of the convict records were housed there. The convict records were one of the first deposits to be made with the appointment of the state archivist in 1950.’

Although the Archives are internationally recognised as having an enviable collection of 19th-century colonial records, Eastley says there are gaps in the material held. ‘The office was not operating until 1951. There was, therefore, a lot of time for government records to lie around in places. What are most obviously missing are the records in the out-stations. These include police station records, court records, early council records for things like road trusts and cemetery trusts. These records were strewn around the place.

‘Nobody cared much and some people collected them. Sometimes, you will see some government records come back through book sales, long after people took them away. We have, for example, bits of some volumes where it was obviously pulled to pieces. All of the convict records from Port Arthur, the female factories and some prison records haven’t survived and some shipping records, passenger lists and school records have been lost.’

Hard as it is to believe, before 1951 and the 1943 institution of the Public Records Act, state records were uncollected and not maintained in any coordinated way.‘After 1950,’ Eastley says, with more than a passing sense of lingering surprise, ‘there was some control over the government records. There was somewhere to put them and an organisation which had responsibility for looking after them and some control over what records were created in the first place’.

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Example of various records held in the Archives Office of Tasmania
Photograph courtesy of Archives Office of Tasmania
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A selection of volumes from the Colonial Secretary’s Office 1824–1836, Governor Arthur’s Administration
Photograph courtesy of Archives Office of Tasmania
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Sample of photographs which are progressively being loaded onto the Archives Office of Tasmania’s website
Photograph courtesy of Archives Office of Tasmania

The result of promoting greater access to the Archives has been that many people no longer feel intimidated by what may appear as an arcane institution catering to scholars. It might still be this to some, but the Archives is also much more.

‘The main users are the social historian and family historians of Tasmania,’ Eastley says. ‘It is pleasing when they publish a discourse as a result of all the work they have done. We have more postgraduate students from the university here currently than we have had in recent years. We also have an increase in international visitors who come to work in the Archives. We don’t feel the need to do a great deal of marketing as we have enough use and interest to keep going.

‘But it is fair and reasonable that we should explain a little bit at least about what we do and that the Archives is in Hobart for public access. In a way people know about the named material as that is easy to find. It is how you use the Archives for other things which is an interest of ours. We have displays of the material from time to time to assist this.’

The Archives might sound like a treasuretrove where the public has access to original documents, but Eastley explains that this is only partly the case. ‘The Act says what we are to preserve and what we are to make available. So if it is on open access, yes the public has the right to see it. But we also have to preserve it so we use a lot of microfilm. That is the way the convict records, pretty much all the colonial records and all the records we index are done. We end up microfilming. We didn’t initially, but then we found that when you highlight the existence of a document, we found later that maybe it has gone missing from the box it was in. While they are not at risk of being lost it is hard to track them down if they are mislaid.’

It is difficult to say what are the Archives’ most prized items, as Eastley says, ‘It is all unique’. Nonetheless Eastley has her favourites. ‘For me the two most interesting groups of records are the colonial secretary’s office files. These started with Governor Arthur in 1824, [and] are amongst the earliest we have together with the convict records.’

Christopher Bantick is a Melbourne journalist

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