Archives & Manuscripts

Editors' notes

Angela Schilling — 2023-12-01

Documenting Australian Society Redux

Adrian Cunningham — 2023-12-01

Documenting Australian Society: Progress Report on an Initiative of the UNESCO Australian Memory of the World Committee

Adrian Cunningham — 2023-12-01

The topic of Documenting Australian Society has been something of an occasional perennial on ASA Conference programs since the 1990s. Archives and manuscripts published a theme issue on it in 2001. In December 2018, the UNESCO Australian Memory of the World Program organised a national summit on the topic in Canberra. That summit meeting endorsed ‘The Canberra Declaration’ as an action agenda for the documentary heritage sectors and agreed that the UNESCO Memory of the World Program should continue to take carriage of the initiative. Since then, a steering committee has been established, and two seminars/webinars have been organised: the first on Documenting COVID-19 in Australia and the second on Documenting the Experiences of Australian on Welfare. This paper discusses the background and objectives of the initiative, its current status and plans for the future.

Documenting the Lived Experience of Disadvantage in Tasmania

Jennifer Jerome — 2023-12-01

This article discusses how government and community records in the Tasmanian Archives provide evidence of how well Tasmanians have met their need for safe shelter. It provides a brief overview of the structures that have guided the development of the Tasmanian Archives collection – how decisions have been made regarding what to add, or exclude, from the collection. It also investigates if records of housing and housing access have been prioritised for long-term retention, and if not, why? The role of case files as key records of lived experience is discussed, with the aim of sparking discourse on the strengths and weaknesses of archival collections as they record disadvantage and the lived experience of Australians. This article is based upon a presentation given by the author at the 2022 Australian Memory of the World Documenting Australian Society Seminar in Canberra.

Documenting Australian Society – Performing Arts Community of Practice

Jenny Fewster — 2023-12-01

While the performing arts are a vitally important dimension of the cultural life of Australia, the performances themselves are often ephemeral and difficult to document in an enduring form. This article describes a successful, collaborative, community of practice-based model for ensuring the creation and curation of performing arts documentation in Australia. The collaboration involves key national professional and industry organisations and peak bodies, working together to ensure that important documentation is identified, preserved, and made available via the AusStage research and discovery platform.

Honouring Stories of Struggle: Reassessing Australia’s Records of Disadvantage – Hearing the Voices of Those Who Struggle

Robyn Sutherland — 2023-12-01

When deciding what and how documentation should be made and kept about the experiences of welfare recipients, it is vital to ensure that recordkeeping strategies meet the needs, preferences and expectations of the recipients of those services. This article presents a transcription of a video created by a non-government community welfare organisation in South Australia that features interviews with a range of that organisation’s clients. Interviewees express concern about the partial and overly negative view of their life experiences captured in the documentation of welfare provision. They suggest that a more holistic approach to documenting their lives would preserve a more accurate and humanistic record of their stories of struggle.

Building a Participatory Archive With an Australian Suburb: Case Study of Canberra’s Biggest Bogan Suburb, Kambah

Louise Curham — 2023-12-01

Participatory appraisal and building archives with communities have been discussed amongst archivists across the world for decades. There is reportage on building community resources for and by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities, but there is less reportage on these endeavours with other communities. This reflection reports on building an archive with the community of Kambah, a suburb with a mixed reputation in the Canberra community.

A challenge for participatory archives identified through this project was scale – if successful, the volume of content quickly becomes overwhelming. Another challenge is the responsibility that goes with accepting content from contributors. Expectations are set up that the content will be used or shared. And crucially, participation means everyone. Strategies are needed to connect with contributors that go beyond relationships in easy reach for the archivist based on existing connections.

A final lesson comes from socially engaged art, a practice that focuses on community participation. This calls on the archivist to recognise their standpoint, the worldview they bring. Our sector has recognised that collections and building them is not neutral. For archivists, there remains much to do to work out how to meaningfully share that power and authority as collections are built.

COVID-19: What Needs to be Documented? Insights from the Pneumonic Influenza of 1918–1919

Anthea Hyslop — 2023-12-01

This article compares the influenza pandemic of 1918–1919 and the recent COVID-19 pandemic in their Australian manifestations, with particular reference to their advent and impact, the response of medical science to each, and their management by federal and state authorities. It also comments on the availability of primary sources, both oral and written, for the study of each pandemic ordeal.

Documenting COVID-19 in Australia: An Interdisciplinary Perspective

Terhi Nurmikko-Fuller — 2023-12-01

Social media posts and unpublished student projects are just two examples of the digital content – a type of ephemeral popular culture – produced during the COVID-19 pandemic. Collecting this material would provide researchers and analysts with information that is complementary to other data used to report and capture the crisis, such as government policies and scientific documentation. But what are the long-term privacy implications of collecting this material? In this time of privacy paradoxes and the Data Economy, does the responsibility for the ethical use of this data fall onto the archivists and researchers?