National Archives Of Australia Research Articles

Selective rememberings? Access to ‘private’ documents at the National Archives of Australia

Selective rememberings? Access to ‘private’ documents at the National Archives of Australia

New angles and long walks: building regional networks through union education

PurposeThis article examines the role the Australian Trade Union Training Authority (TUTA) played in international education through the provision of trade union courses and exchanges. We consider how an investigation of trade union networks contributes to a richer understanding of international education linkages.Design/methodology/approachThis paper is based on research conducted for an Australian Research Council (ARC)-funded project: Trade union training: reshaping the Australian industrial landscape (ARC LP180100500). This research involved a critical analysis of 60 semi-structured oral history interviews and textual archives, including the official records held by the National Archives of Australia and papers held by the Noel Butlin Archives, the Australian Council of Trade Unions and in private collections.FindingsTUTA was established primarily as a national union training organisation, but from its inception, it also acted as a hub for the development of regional and international labour networks. The nature of TUTA’s work placed it at the intersection of international trade union and educational domains. Although there were some points of contact with formal international programs (e.g. Japan–Australia and Kellogg Foundations, the Colombo Plan and US Department of Labour exchanges schemes), the specific contribution of TUTA is overlooked in the educational exchange literature. The role of TUTA is revealed through institutional connections and individual experiences.Research limitations/implicationsFurther research is required to gain a deeper understanding of the impact of TUTA from the perspective of former participants in international TUTA course and current and former trade unionists in the Asia–Pacific.Originality/valueThis article builds new knowledge by examining the connections forged in the Asia–Pacific region at the intersection of trade union and educational networks, an area often overlooked in the literature on educational exchange.

Critical Archival Encounters and the Evolving Historiography of the Dismissal of the Whitlam Government

Gough Whitlam was deeply committed to the preservation of history, and keenly attuned to the importance of the documentary record in the writing of it. For Whitlam, the written record — the contemporaneous documentary record of government activity — was central to the production of historical knowledge and the “verification” of history. As he reflected on the release of his government's 1975 Cabinet papers, “the publication of these records confirms my belief in the contemporary document as the primary source for writing and understanding history”. This paper takes us through the shifting historiography of the dismissal of the Whitlam government by Governor‐General Sir John Kerr. In doing so, it is a reflection also on the role of archives in the writing of history, recognising as Peters does, that the construction of an archival record is “a deeply political act”. This is particularly so for contested, polarised, episodes — of which the dismissal is surely the exemplar — for which archival records have been transformative. In this process of historical correction, revelations from Kerr's papers in the National Archives of Australia have been pivotal. Kerr's papers were also central to my successful legal action against the Archives securing the release of the “Palace letters” between Kerr and the Queen regarding the dismissal. This paper explores some critical “archival encounters” during that research journey — revelations, obstructions, missing archives, and even burnt archives. From the destruction of Whitlam's security file, missing Government House guestbooks, the denial of access to records, to royal letters of support for Kerr's dismissal of Whitlam “accidentally burnt” in the Yarralumla incinerator, these encounters illuminate the critical relationship between archives, access, and history which continue to shape our understanding of the dismissal of the Whitlam government.

Diagrams in the field: Three conceptual approaches in the entries for the 1979 Australian Parliament House design competition

Compositional relationships are well established between Walter Burley Griffin and Marion Mahony Griffin’s 1912 urban plan for Canberra and the winning design by Mitchell, Giurgola and Thorp for Australia’s New Parliament House. As recognised by Andrew Hutson in 2011 and 2013, the civic-scale geometric planning features of the parliamentary triangle and land axis—from the Griffin Plan—influenced the competition brief, submitted entries, and assessors’ deliberations for the 1979 Australian Parliament House design competition. Yet, on reviewing the remaining submissions for 324 of the competition entries in the National Archives of Australia, many schemes appear to reject an apparent alignment with the geometric symbolism of the Griffin Plan. 
 This article surveys the lesser-known majority of competition submissions to consider other approaches to the relationship between Canberra’s urban plan and proposed parliamentary architecture, beyond the historical significance of the Griffin Plan. By comparing James Weirick’s 1989 criticism of Parliament’s remote location to Colin Rowe and Fred Koetter’s 1978 criticism of urban voids, it identifies three conceptual approaches to the problems of the site’s isolation—apparent in common characteristics across many entrants’ unique schemes. These three approaches include rejecting references to Canberra’s urban exterior with autonomous parliamentary architectural forms; internalising Canberra’s urban plan within parliamentary designs replete with symbolic gestures; or reclassifying parliamentary architecture as urban interiors for gathering places of public representation. Each approach reflects interpretations of Australia’s parliamentary democracy in different ways, and reveals risks and potential benefits for democratic practices when architecture and urban planning is employed to speak for the rights of others.

Reimagining the Commonwealth Record Series System

In the 1960s, Peter Scott proposed a new way of controlling records at the National Archives of Australia that became known as the Commonwealth Record Series (CRS) system. Acknowledging the ever-changing nature of governments, the CRS focused on the Series as the central entity for controlling records allowing connection to multiple Agents (creators/controllers). What constitutes a record though has always been open for discussion and has become potentially more ephemeral in the digital realm. This paper looks at recent work undertaken at the National Archives to reimagine the underlying data model of the CRS system to allow for more flexibility in capturing digital records.

Tales from “THE disK FILES”: Lessons Learnt from a Data Recovery Project in 2003–2006 at the National Archives of Australia

ABSTRACT This case study re-evaluates a large-scale project carried out by the National Archives of Australia (NAA) between 2003 and 2006. The project aimed to identify obsolete digital media (physical data carriers) in its collection and to describe and recover the data from the carriers using a third-party data recovery provider.1 A detailed process for data recovery was developed that included the capture of a full audit trail of steps in the data recovery process. The project was completed in four stages: phase 1 obtained bit-level images from the carriers; phase 2 extracted individual bit-files from the carriers; phase 3 identified duplicate files and proprietary or complex file formats; and phase 4 was a final report that documented processes, made recommendations on future processes, and provided lessons learned. Recent work described in this article indicates that files extracted from the carriers in 2004–2005 can be accurately rendered in current computer environments. The ongoing significance of the project is that it is an early demonstration of the success of bit-level preservation and the need to create disk images as part of a preservation workflow, suggesting a sustainable methodology for digital preservation. The project also influenced archival policy at the NAA and influenced the development of subsequent software tools that became widely known in the broader digital preservation community. The focus on archival principles of authenticity, integrity, chain of custody, and provenance of the recovered records were key learnings to ensuring long-term access and usability. Finally, the metrics resulting from the project, for example, rates of readable carriers and rates of data recovery by carrier type, are useful data from a point in time that correspond quite closely to similar data recovery projects undertaken by other institutions at about the same time and provide a benchmark for future research.

Cold War Olympics: A New Battlefront in Psychological Warfare 1948–1956

For most scholars, the idea that politics and sports have always occupied separate spheres is an ahistorical fallacy. Although the refrain has been trumpeted by such high-placed figures as International Olympic Committee (IOC) president Avery Brundage, the notion has been roundly debunked by historians. Cold War Olympics: A New Battlefront in Psychological Warfare, 1948–1956 by Harry Blutstein adds yet another voice to this chorus. Blutstein demonstrates that international politics profoundly shaped the ways in which the Olympics were interpreted, organized, and consumed during the first decade of the Cold War. In essence, the games were transformed into an ideological battlefield. Athletes, officials, coaches, and journalists—all were expected to join the fight.Central to this combat in track cleats was the implementation of “psychological warfare,” an array of “nonlethal strategies” used by capitalist and communist nations alike “to win the hearts and minds of unaligned countries and to reassure allies and their own populace that they had the strength and determination to prevail” (1). Olympic defections represented some of the most coveted trophies. For the US and other capitalist countries, it was mostly about identifying and coaxing potential defectors, while Soviet-bloc nations aimed to prevent that from happening. In crisp, clear prose, Blutstein recounts the histories of several Olympic asylum seekers, including Czechoslovakian gymnastics official Marie Provazníková, who defected after the 1948 London Games; and the nearly three dozen Hungarian athletes, who, after the vicious quelling of the anti-communist insurgency in their native country, joined the celebrated Freedom Tour in America in early 1957 (some stayed in the US afterward; others did not). Of particular interest is Blutstein's discussion of three security operations—codenamed Griffin, Robin Redbreast, and Wren—undertaken by agents loosely affiliated with the American government and Australian authorities whose purpose was to woo and protect asylum seekers before, during, and after the 1956 Melbourne Games. “For Cold War warriors engaged in psychological warfare,” Blutstein contends, “high-profile defectors like Olympic athletes were high-caliber ammunition” (111).Propagandistic firepower also resulted from finishing atop the Olympic medal table. Victory at the games proved that one political-economic system was better than the other. Both superpowers participated in such ideological legerdemain. The Soviets were more blatant about it, directly attributing Olympic success to socialism. By contrast, the Americans rationalized defeat by complaining that, for example, communist Olympians were really professionals in disguise. Cold War Olympics considers other incidents freighted with political or propagandistic meaning, such as the visit by US athletes to the communist Olympic Village, aka “Sportsgrad,” during the 1952 Helsinki Games; the participation of the united German Olympic squad, which included athletes from both West and East Germany, in 1956; the violent Hungarian-USSR water polo game at the 1956 Melbourne Games; and the marriage of American hammer thrower Hal Connolly to Olga Fikitová, a discus thrower from Czechoslovakia, in 1957. Connolly and Fikitová had first met at the Olympics in Melbourne.As Blutstein notes in the preface, portions of Cold War Olympics initially appeared as a book in Australia. For the current version, Blutstein fleshed out some sections of the original publication. Large chunks of the book are based on research conducted in the National Archives of Australia, thus providing a viewpoint that has been underemphasized in Olympic historiography. The result is a work that is broad in scope yet sensitive to the human side of sport. In fact, one of the strengths of Cold War Olympics is Blutstein's ability to construct empathetic biographies of less-familiar but still important Olympic figures as Nikolai Romanov, head of the USSR's All-Union Committee of Physical Culture and Sport during the Soviet Union's initial foray into international athletics, and Hungarian water polo player Dezsö Gyarmarti. In addition, the nuanced analysis of events in Cold War Olympics foregrounds the finer points of history. For instance, readers learn that communist China's withdrawal from the Melbourne Olympics may have been caused in part by the subtle gamesmanship employed by the president of the Melbourne Organizing Committee, Wilfred Kent Hughes, who harbored a distaste for communism.Although Cold War Olympics discusses events in detail, there are a few notable omissions. For example, the presence of doping in the games is hardly mentioned, as is the administrative Cold War that played out within the IOC boardroom. Equally noticeable is the rather abrupt ending of the book. Blutstein would have been well served to expand the conclusion and maybe even include an epilogue in which central topics of the book—the marriage of Hal Connolly and Olga Fikitová, for example—could be projected out into the future, giving readers a sense of what became of the events. The admirable qualities of the book, though, far exceed its limitations. Blutstein's fine effort with Cold War Olympics should have sport scholars looking forward to his next publication.

British Commonwealth Archives from Far North to Distant South: Neglected Resources for Cold War International History

Abstract British Commonwealth archives constitite a rich and often under-utilized source of material for understanding the international history of the 20th and 21st centuries. From the late 19th Century onward, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand each enjoyed close and confidential relations with not just Britain, but with each other and increasingly, too, with the United States. They also participated in major international organizations at both an official and non-governmental level. Although or perhaps because each was a “middle” rather than “great” power, as each country developed its own diplomatic bureaucracy, their representatives often had informal and even intimate insights into the policies of a wide range of countries. This article introduces the highlights of each nation’s major archival repositories for materials relating to international affairs. While the holdings of the Library and Archives of Canada in Ottawa, the National Archives of Australia and the National Library of Australia in Canberra, and the National Archives of New Zealand in Wellington all feature prominently, the author casts a wider net and draw researchers’ attention to additional important and often under-utilized collections scattered across the different countries.

Film for a purpose: a pictorial introduction

ABSTRACT Created for the Uses of Cinema conference (SSAAANZ, Monash University, November 2018), the video Film for a Purpose (13 minutes, 2018) offers a précis of my research with the ARC Discovery project ‘Utilitarian film in Australia 1945-1980'. The video essay ironically deploys certain tropes of the sponsored film - the green screen, the authoritative presenter, the wallto-wall narration, the literal illustration, etc. - in its exposition of the studies cited. An overview of the National Archives of Australia (NAA) where moving image collections of Australian government agencies are collected then drills down to films from the CSIRO (Commonwealth Science and Industrial Research Organisation) Film Unit. Uses of Cinema then turns to films of the Australian labour movement through the lens of Tom Zubrycki's controversial documentary film history of the Australian trade union movement, Amongst Equals (1986-1991). Each case study brings to light certain problems pertinent to the broader category: the ‘utilitarian film', in the Australian context. Finally a fourth research paper, completed after 2018, examines the surveillance image and its uses in political propaganda and investigative documentary. This ‘pictorial introduction' lightly annotates a selection of freeze frames from the film, explicating aspects of their ‘screen design’ and treatment.

Awakening the film censors’ archive in [CENSORED] (2018)

[CENSORED] (2018) is a feature-length collage of clips excised from international films by the Australian Film Censorship Board between 1958 and 1971, which historian and artist Sari Braithwaite uncovered in the National Archives of Australia. While the censored clips were archived alphabetically, Braithwaite curates them by motif, capturing the numbness generated by archivists’ and censors’ processes through repetitive bombardment of similar imagery in various categories of sex and violence. Compiling and re-categorising this trove of censored fragments produces a new perspective not only into past practices of censorship but more insightfully, into patterns of gendered dynamics and action in narrative cinema. Through feminist critical practice, Braithwaite deploys a ‘layered gaze’ and expands a critique of censorship to a critique of cinema. Braithwaite’s film mobilizes ‘productive misuse’ (Baron 2020), not for her original goal of damning censorship, but to reflect on cinematic fixations (including female nudity and sexual violence) and spectatorial implication. By suturing the censors’ excisions, Braithwaite draws attention to her own growing feminist ‘disenchantment’ (Elsaesser 2005) with cinema culture as she engages with the censors’ offcuts. [CENSORED] documents an awakening of – and from – the censors’ archive. The film evolves through sensory engagement with this archive, and in doing so, provides insight into the comparable – and sometimes complicit – processes of film spectatorship, censorship, and audio-visual archival research.

Call to service: The Register of Australian Accountants for National Service 1940–1944

PurposeThe paper explores the creation in Australia of the Register of Accountants for National Service. Established at the outset of the Second World War, the Register operated for four years from June 1940 providing voluntary, non-remunerated, part-time and after-hours services to a highly stressed and seriously stretched federal government bureaucracy by members of the main Australian professional accounting bodies. Departments of the Navy, Army, Air Force, Supply and Development and Munitions were the largest consumers of the services offered.Design/methodology/approachThe study of the Register relies mainly on an extensive archive of war-time documentation from the Federal Government and various accounting professional institutes which has survived, predominantly in the National Archives of Australia. The resource is particularly rich in material covering the complex negotiation processes that brought the Register into operation together with documentation recording and reporting the work of the Register. The themes of professionalization, institutional legitimacy, volunteerism and patriotism are all invoked to explain the presence of the Register in the machinery of government that was assembled to deliver the ultimately successful war effort. Created by the principal professional accounting institutes, the Register attests to the commitment of their members to the war effort and, thereby, the importance of the profession to Australian society.FindingsThe perilous situation of Australia at a time of war provided a compelling incentive for the accounting profession to organise itself in an efficient and highly effective manner to assist with the war effort. The disparate and somewhat fractured accounting profession at the time was able to work together in a structured, cohesive and disciplined manner to provide voluntary services when called upon. To deliver the voluntary services promised, a purpose-built set of institutional arrangements was put in place. An extensive inventory of the potential services that could be provided by members of the main professional accounting bodies was conducted to facilitate the smooth matching of government needs with services available.Research limitations/implicationsDiscussion focusses only on Australia where the Register was unique. No other examples have been discovered where a profession has self-mobilised to serve a nation in a time of war. A further limitation is that the activities reported are restricted to self-reporting by the Register and a small loose collection of documents prepared by the Department of the Navy.Originality/valueThe uniqueness of the Register is the core of the originality and value of this study. How and why it came into being and the method by which it completed the “task” assigned to it stand as testament to a profession strategically placed to contribute in a substantive manner to the war effort at minimal cost to the nation.

Deadly serious: The United Nations, drugs, and capital punishment in the 1980s

BackgroundResearch into capital punishment has focussed on the length of time it will take to abolish. It will take decades or centuries. A key moment in the movement to abolish the death penalty was the 1980s when the Second Optional Protocol to the ICCPR was developed. This was also the decade that the last significant changes were made to the United Nations drug conventions. At the time, awareness of the issue of capital punishment for drug offences was increasing around the world as more people were getting executed. This article looks at how western countries and the United Nations responded to Malaysia which introduced the mandatory death penalty for drug offences in 1982. MethodsOver 30,000 pages of documents have been accessed through the National Archives of Australia in Canberra. These have been photographed, scanned and converted to OCR. The most relevant folders have then been analysed through NVivo 12 to look for relevant mentions of the research question: capital punishment and Malaysia. All probative data is then presented in the article. ResultsThe data from National Archives suggests that the UN, Australia, and other western countries were happy to continue supporting Malaysia's drug policy and to elect it to high positions at UN meetings despite their public proclamations that they were opposed to the death penalty. ConclusionApplying a critical juncture approach, the article concludes that the 1980s was a critical juncture in the movement to abolish the death penalty but abolitionist countries allowed capital punishment to continue for drug offences. This may have set back the abolition movement by decades.

Sport and Defection From Romania During the Cold War

During the Cold War in Eastern Europe, sport and politics became increasingly intertwined and complicated as the communist states, which strictly controlled the movement of its athletes, allowed athletes to travel abroad for competition, consequently opening opportunities for defection. In search of a better life, many athletes knowingly put themselves and their families at great risk, seeking opportunities to defect to other countries once outside their national borders. The purpose of this study is to analyze how the communist state in Romania acted to stop the defection of athletes from Romania, focusing on two defection situations which occurred at different points during the Cold War, one in 1956 and the second in 1981. Historical data for this study were retrieved from the National Council for the Study of Securitate Archives (CNSAS) in Romania, the archives at the Lausanne Olympic Museum in Switzerland, and the online archives from the National Archives of Australia (NAA).

Being Cabinet historian: a reflection

In April 2018, I was invited to submit an expression of interest for the position of visiting Cabinet historian to the National Archives of Australia (NAA). I was informed that the Archives had con...

From DP Camps to the “Green Continent”

This review focuses on a monograph written by Jayne Persian, lecturer at the University of Southern Queensland (Australia). The work is the first complex study devoted to the adaptation of former “displaced persons” (more particularly, émigrés from the Soviet Union) in Australia between the 1940s and 1960s. The work refers to an extensive complex of documents from the National Archives of Australia, the National Archives (United Kingdom), the Noel Butlin Archives Centre, Australian National University, and interviews with former “displaced persons” residing in Australia. The study is very important because it provides new information on the second wave of Soviet emigration, which is seldom examined by contemporary Russian scholars. Persian demonstrates that political factors played an important role in how the Australian government granted immigration permission. Quite frequently, Australia preferred people who shared anti-communist positions. Therefore, many former collaborators of the World War II era came to Australia; this hindered cooperation between the USSR and Australia. Persian shows that “new Australians” had difficulty integrating into society. The government tried to assimilate them, which pushed the immigrants to seek isolation in their communities. This book helps us understand the controversial character of the state policy of historical memory, a problem that is also very important for contemporary Russia.

A societal provenance analysis of the First World War service records held at the National Archives of Australia

ABSTRACT This article offers a societal provenance analysis of the First World War personal service records held at the National Archives of Australia as Commonwealth Records Series B2455. It describes the communities of people and communities of records with which the series has its origins. Since creation, the records have enabled intricate interactions between individuals, families, government agencies and communities. They have facilitated personal, local, and national processes of grieving and commemoration, and bridged spatial, temporal and emotional distances. They have contributed to national projects such as the Roll of Honour at the Australian War Memorial, and the provision of pensions and support for veterans and their families. Their use by historians continues to shape our understanding of the history of the war. Access to the records helps build new personal identities, and new online communities of users. It is suggested that all these interactions are part of the history of the records we now have. The losses in the records, the gaps and silences, are also identified.

Remaking the border: the proposed border expansion of Canberra in the 1960–70s revisited in the planning and development context of the 21st century

ABSTRACT In the 1960–70s, there was a proposal to expand the administrative border of Canberra into the neighbouring state New South Wales to accommodate long-term population growth and urban development. However, this attempt failed ultimately. This study investigates this ‘remaking’ of the border, and revisits the same issue in the planning and development context of the twenty-first century. It employs three conceptual constructs – ‘bordering’, ‘debording’, and ‘rebordering’ – to draw insights into the nexus between the border’s (re)making, dominant planning thinking, and emerging development process. It uses a mix of primary and secondary sources of data and information collected from the National Archives of Australia, newspaper clippings of The Canberra Times, interviews with planners involved, Australian Census data, and planning literature. It finds that the border expansion proposal was driven by a political advocacy out of a modernist technocratic planning vision for a linear city, and was based on an over-optimistic and mechanical population projection. However, as a highly political initiative, its failure was doomed by political strains and changes, and local community’s concerns. Knowing this history contributes to tackling a similar issue in today’s paradox of a planning paradigm for compactness and sustainability and an emerging development expansion onto the border.

The Publication of Guide to the Japanese Company Records Previously Held by the National Archives of Australia, with Box Lists

The Publication of Guide to the Japanese Company Records Previously Held by the National Archives of Australia, with Box Lists

Shrine: War Memorials and the Digital Age

Shrine: War Memorials and the Digital Age

Accountability implications of the OECD’s economistic approach to education: A historical case analysis

Using Australia as a case, it is the purpose of this article to historically investigate the implications of the OECD’s economistic approach to education in terms of accountability in order to add more clarity and body to the concept of intelligent accountability proposed by the British philosopher Onora O’Neill. Such a historical prism offers the opportunity to illuminate past experiences and debates which can then be used as vehicles for gaining insights into the pitfalls and opportunities in terms of accountability in education. The empirical documents under investigation stems from the OECD archive in Paris as well as the national archives of Australia. The material has been selected from a database of OECD archival documents consisting of some 1908 documents on various programmes and activities in education in the period 1961 to 2015. The search criteria in the database has been that ‘accountability’ and ‘Australia’ should occur in the document which has generated some 165 documents. The article argues that a clear distinction can be drawn between accountability to the local stakeholders with the purpose of creating transparency and best practices in terms of running a school in a community versus accountability for external purposes like measuring the performance level of a nation’s labour force, ranking schools, school districts and/or nations against each other. In this light, the article identifies a need for a ‘co-creation’ approach to the development of accountability practices which can serve to establish a fair balance between input and output focus.