UMA

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Bulletin of The University of Melbourne Archives

No. 13, NOVEMBER 2003

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here is nothing like involvement with a careers workshop for postgraduate historians and a study tour overseas to set the thoughts racing.

The former, organised recently by the University of Melbourne Department of History, sought (unfortunately presumed) wise counsel based on 30 plus years of employment in archives. My reluc- tance arose because so much has changed since employment opportunities, especially within the Commonwealth government service, expanded dramatically in the Whitlam years of the 1970s. Institutions such as the National Library which I joined then no longer offer cadetships to undertake

postgraduate professional qualifications with a guarantee of

‘permanent’ employment on completion. For a decade or more now, most Australian students have had to work part-time while undertaking full time study and have only casual or short term project work to look forward to, at least in the interim. The National Archives, which advertises an annual intake for gradu- ates and usually takes four to five per year, had over 700

applications this year, mostly from people completing arts degrees.

As well, the halcyon days when there were dozens of postgraduate education programs in librarianship and archives are gone.

Beyond mouthing generalities like ‘develop a keen sense of your comparative advantage and learn to sell it’, and

‘be prepared to move’

(i.e. don’t think you must stay in Melbourne to start a career), I strug- gled to give useful advice. One point I was certain about however was that history and archives/records, though connected, are different professions. A good historian no more automatically makes a good archivist than does being a competent food critic mean one can run a successful restaurant business.

The employment scene duly noted, an equally major change has been in the nature of record keeping (one by-product of which is the archival record), which has changed enormously in

Naughty Boy Meanderings

Peter Horsman and Michael Piggott taken at the recent I-CHORA conference. Peter Horsman currently works at the Archiefschool, the Netherlands Institute for Archival Education and Research, where he is responsible for the research program.

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a single generation. I represent a demographic which remembers when mobile phones didn’t exist, when emailing meant sending a telegram, the standard paper size was foolscap, when primary schools had ink monitors, the photocopier was a gestetner, document production meant negotiating with the typing pool, wages were paid in cash and data processors used IMB punch cards. As a child, shopping with parents for me was fun because I could watch the loose change from a purchase appear via a cylinder container fired along a wire cable by a cashier sitting up on a mezzanine eyrie!

Today archivists and records managers must not only be more than IT literate, but also skilled in the management and preservation of electronic records. The archives of tomorrow are being created today; indeed emailing, word processing and digi- tisation began in earnest nearly a decade ago. Unless they realise this, historians enrolling to undertake archival studies, and indeed anyone else drawn to the romance and rich physicality of older paper, audio-visual and other ‘analogue’ documents, will find it harder and harder to fill vacancies advertised for archives and records work. The growth areas are in environments where archives and records are born digital, and no longer even called or conceived of as ‘records’.

As one final allusion to my age, I can still recall lines from John Keats’A Song about Myselfwhich tells of a naughty boy who ran away to Scotland, only to find that ‘the ground was as hard, that the yard was as long, that a song was as merry, … as in England’. There were moments during my recent travelling when I sympathised with this boy who, on realising how much really is shared in common, how much is not new under the sun,

‘stood in his shoes and … wondered’. At the Guildhall Library, London, the Canadian National Archives, and archives at uni- versities in Glasgow, Vancouver and Hong Kong it is clear they face many of the same challenges as we do at the University of Melbourne Archives (UMA): what to collect (in particular, what business archives to go after); how to preserve depositors’ electronic records in a collecting environment; how to secure fund- ing to list, properly house and digitise collections; and how to encourage use.

Nevertheless, some things are different and worth closer study, whatever Keats’ naughty boy concluded as to similarities between England and Scotland. In Canada I learnt of a superb example of corporate generosity involving the Hudson’s Bay Company, a name familiar I’m sure to historians and probably anyone who, while visiting Canada, has shopped at a branch of The Bay or Zellers. About ten years ago the company made a gift for tax purposes of its vast historical collection of documents and artefacts, valued at over $60m. The favoured recipients were the provincial (i.e. publicly funded) Archives of Manitoba and the Manitoba Museum, both in Winnipeg, but through them of course the people of Canada generally. And rather than pocket the money, the company established a History Foundation to support the collection, and more generally, to encourage other archives and school and local history programs. All this

happened under the banner of its community investment program, part of its commitment to social responsibility. I stood in my shoes and wondered about the same ‘cultural gifts’ tax scheme that we have, and at how few examples there are in Australia of businesses who realise that community investment can have historical and archival dimensions.

The Hudson’s Bay Company archive was the natural out- come of a record keeping system which evolved over the past 330 years to address business needs at key points in its history.

Given the nature of its trading and associated activities such as exploration, mapping, land development and retailing, it was in some respects quite innovative. The history of its records system was one of the papers presented at the first international conference on the history of records and archives (I-CHORA), held at the Faculty of Information Studies, University of Toronto in early October this year. I was fortunate enough to be able to attend to talk about Australian diaries, and fortunate also given the intrinsic importance of and interest in the subject.

The Toronto conference represented a maturing of the archival profession’s acceptance that the history of archives and records is a legitimate and rich inter-disciplinary field for research, a development which parallels the emergence of the

‘history of the book’ movement a generation ago. The scope of our field is enormous, and just as book history embraces the rise of print culture as well as reading and authorship, so this conference ranged across topics as diverse as the evolution of record keeping systems, individual document types (diaries, postcards, epigraphs), record keeping processes such as handwritten signa- tures, documents as artefacts, indigenous ‘ways of knowing’ and the history of records in preserving social memory. I returned with a renewed appreciation of the UMA’s own collection, with its innumerable examples of exotic record types, defunct record keeping systems and obsolete but fascinating examples of office technology which add context to the records themselves. Keats was at least half right: there are many things we do and have which really are different and significant, but many others which are universal.

Michael Piggott University Archivist

Frank Strahan

As this Bulletin was being finalised we learnt the sad news of Frank Strahan's death. As UMA's foundation archivist between 1960 and 1995, his contribution was central to our development and success. Appropriate coverage of Frank's life and work will be included in the next issue.

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Liberty Victoria

Suzanne Fairbanks Deputy University Archivist

Executive Officer Nicole Schlesinger applied for a grant from the Victoria Law Foundation to develop a records management program and to digitise the audio tapes.

This enabled Nicole to work with a consultant, Peter Bode, from the University of Melbourne’s Records Management Program to cre- ate three documents: a Business Classification Scheme which Liberty Victoria can use to structure and title their electronic and paper documents; a Records Management Thesaurus which lists terms from the Business Classification Scheme in alphabetical order to assist ease of use; and a Records Retention and Disposal Schedule.

Together these documents will guide the management of Liberty Victoria records from their creation and use, to disposal and archiving.

For Liberty Victoria this will ensure that they can manage and retrieve records and allow continuity for ongoing purposes and prevent costly clutter. For the UMA it will mean that records of contin- uing value are transferred in an orderly manner and are instantly able to be accessed and used by researchers.

Records of Liberty Victoria have been found in the homes or workplaces of three former officials as well as in the office. Consolidating them will now be both a priority and a pleasure.

professional organisations. They are usually run by volunteers, sometimes with a part-time administrator, and their records are often scattered amongst participants and successive secretaries, as they have no settled office in which to store them.

Continuity and consistency of records are not guaranteed, leading to potential problems of administration for the organisa- tion, including loss of their most important documents and retention of too many less important ones. If they offer their records to a collecting archive, a great deal of work is often necessary to recon- struct important series of documents and dispose of those judged non-permanent.

With this experience in mind, the UMA and Liberty Victoria are co-operating to consolidate its records management. Under the auspices of successive presidents of Liberty Victoria, Chris Maxwell and Greg Connellan,

L

iberty Victoria, the Victorian Council for Civil Liberties, was established by Brian Fitzpatrick in 1936, and still exists at the forefront of campaigns on a wide range of issues concerning the funda- mental rights and freedoms of Australians. The forum and format of these campaigns has been many and varied, from a weekly radio program to sub- missions on law and policy reform to journal articles and media comment. UMA already holds the records of other people and organisations involved

in political and social change in Australia and saw the acquisition of the Liberty Victoria archives as an important addition to them.

The partnership was initiated when Dr June Factor offered the UMA her papers relating to Liberty Victoria, including 178 audio tapes of programs on civil liberties which she and Jamie Gardiner, Vice-President of Liberty Victoria, presented on radio station 3CR between 1981 and 1994. A generous grant from the Victoria Law Foundation will enable UMA to digitise these tapes.

Dr Factor’s offer also alerted Michael Piggott, University Archivist, that Liberty Victoria was another example of a community group where the records are found in the private hands of ex-officials. UMA has been seeking an opportunity to develop a different way of working with such community and

Dr June Factor and Sue Fairbanks at Liberty Victoria’s recent Alan Missen Oration held at University House.

At Liberty Victoria’s Alan Missen Oration and Dinner held at University House on 4 October 2003, a slight diversion occurred before the oration ‘This Trusting Nation’ by Julian Burnside QC. As symbolic recognition of a new partnership between Liberty Victoria and the UMA, Dr June Factor, past president of Liberty Victoria, presented Suzanne Fairbanks, Deputy University Archivist, with reports from the Brian Fitzpatrick Testimonial Dinner 1964 and the Brian Fitzpatrick Memorial Dinner 1984.

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he Information D i v i s i o n

recently mounted a very successful exhibition, Keeping the Drama on Stage — 50 years of MTC, from 4 August to 12 September, 2003. It was presented in the Baillieu Library exhibition area as part of its annual exhibitions program and as our contribution to the celebration of the 50th anniversary of the Melbourne Theatre Company (MTC). The exhibition contained a selection of photographs, theatre programs, hand- bills, posters, reviews, correspondence, set designs, costume illustrations, millinery, props and ephemera from the UMA’s MTC collection, the MTC itself, the Performing Arts Museum and private collections, covering a 50 year time span.

The MTC commenced life at the University, with the support of the University Council in August 1953, operating as the Union Theatre Repertory Company (UTRC), under the

leadership of founding administrator and director, John Sumner, and is now a semi-autonomous department of the University. Simon Phillips is the current Artistic Director.

The UTRC was thus the first professional, non-commercial theatre company in Australia, originally modelled on English repertory lines, providing full-time employment for Australian actors and production personnel, and ultimately served as the model for all Australian mainstream state theatre companies.

The UTRC played in the Union Theatre for seven months of the year from 1953 to 1965, and began performing for the other five months of the year at the Russell Street Theatre (behind the Forum and now defunct Rapallo Cinemas) in 1961.

In 1968, UTRC changed its name to the Melbourne Theatre

Company. Despite moving off campus in 1966, the relationship

between the MTC and the University remains strong today.

Keeping The Drama On Stage highlighted the MTC’s origins at, and links to, the University and celebrated other highlights and achievements from its

history.

The exhibition catalogue, written by curator Gordon Dunlop, is virtual- ly a potted history of the company, featuring many of its principal artists (such as Zoe Caldwell, Frederick Parslow, Monica Maughan, Frank Thring, Malcolm Robertson, Patricia Kennedy, George Whaley, Helen Morse, Frank Gallacher, Pamela Rabe, George Ogilvie, Anne Fraser, Kristian Fredrikson, Tony Tripp, John Sumner, Ray Lawler, Wal Cherry, Roger Hodgman and Simon Phillips) and memorable productions, such as The Summer of the Seventeenth Doll (1955), Moby Dick Rehearsed (1960, 1967), Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

(1964–65), The Homecoming(1965), Henry 1V(Part 1) (1969), The Last of the Knucklemen(1973), The Club (1977, 1998), The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui (1979, 1999), The Importance of Being Earnest (1988), Angels in America (1994), Arcadia (1995), Julius Caesar (1996) and Cloud Nine(2003).

The exhibition was launched very successfully on the evening of Monday 4 August. Speakers at the launch were Zoe Caldwell, the company’s first leading lady, now an international theatre celebrity with four Tony Awards on Broadway to her credit, Simon Phillips, MTC’s Artistic Director, Gordon Dunlop,

Keeping the Drama on Stage — 50 Years of MTC

Gordon Dunlop Project Curator

A Baillieu Librar

y Exhibition celebrating the 50th anniversar y of the MTC

KEEPING THE DRAMA ON ST AGE

4 AUGUST to

12 SEPTEMBER 2003

Exhibition space, 1st floor

, Baillieu Librar y

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the Curator, and Dr Angela Bridgland, Acting Vice-Principal (Information). Guests included actors Bob Hornery, Lewis Fiander, Malcolm Robertson, Richard Piper, Bruce Kerr, Caroline Lee, Lyndell Rowe, playwright Alan Hopgood, director Kate Cherry, MTC’s General Manager Ann Tonks, Shadow Minister for the Arts Andrew Olexander, Deputy Chancellor Dr Norman Curry, President of the Academic Board Professor Peter McPhee, and Head of the School of Creative Arts Angela O’Brien.

Zoe Caldwell last returned to the Melbourne Theatre Company for Medeain 1984, when the MTC took up residence in the Playhouse of the then newly built Victorian Arts Centre, and has just visited again for Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s aptly titled The Visit,performing with MTC stalwarts from the 1950s, such as Alex Scott (Zoe’s co-star from Colombe), Bob Hornery, Lewis Fiander and Beverley Dunn. Zoe visited the University again for an even more auspicious occasion on Tuesday 26 August — the conferring of her Honorary Doctorate of Laws. John Sumner, the company founder, received an Honorary Doctorate from the

Left to right: Gordon Dunlop (Curator), Simon Phillips and Zoe Caldwell at the opening of Keeping the Drama on Stage.Photo: Les ORourke.

University in 1984 and Barry Humphries, who performed with the company in the mid-1950s, received one on the eve of the exhibition as well.

The Student Theatre Department also hosted an exhibition in August on the History of the Union House Theatre,so the two exhibitions provided students, staff, theatre buffs and visitors an excellent opportunity to reminisce about or discover the rich history of theatre on campus.

MTC concludes its 50th Anniversary year with a new production of Nöel Coward’s Blithe Spirit,the second play it ever produced (in the Union Theatre in September 1953, with Zoe Caldwell). The new production is directed by former Artistic Director, Roger Hodgman, and features Pamela Rabe, the company’s leading lady of the 1990s.

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day long symposium on the fate of business archives in the 21st century was held on 24 October at the Australian National University (ANU) in Canberra. The ANU Archives Program jointly sponsored this event with the Friends of the Noel Butlin Archives Centre (NBAC) and the Australian Capital Territory branch of the Australian Society of Archivists. The symposium was held to celebrate the golden anniversary of the foundation of the NBAC.

Two members of the UMA’s staff attended and the Rio Tinto Business Archivist Trevor Hart presented a paper setting out the background to the re-writing of the UMA’s business record collecting policy.

Associate Professor David Merrett, chairman of the UMA's Archives Advisory Board set the tenor of the day with a stimu- lating keynote address explicating the challenges we face in collecting modern business records. Eight speakers and a panel

session filled the day. They discussed problems of adequacy of records for research, locating the records of the retail industry in Australia, the whereabouts of records of businesses operating in the Pacific region, and collecting policy. One speaker challenged us with questions on whether businesses needed to maintain archives — his answer was a resounding NO.

Finally, a spirited debate ensued over expressions of concern for future preservation of business records in Australia. This debate will lead to the possible creation of a taskforce charged with setting guidelines for the establishment of a national body to co-ordinate the preservation of business archives in Australia.

If formed the taskforce will report within 12 months. Business does, however, seem less sympathetic to maintaining archival records now than it did in the middle of last century, and devis- ing a national strategy for ensuring preservation of business archives will be challenging.

Where have all the Archives gone?

Trevor Hart Rio Tinto Business Archivist

Thirty Years of Trade Union Collecting

Sarah Brown Project Archivist (Trade Unions)

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003 marks 30 years of trade union collecting at UMA.

In 1973, the first four collections of what would become a major research strength of the Archives were transferred. The first collections received were the Federated Photo Engravers, Photo-Lithographers and Photogravure Employees’ Association of Australia, the Federated Rubber and Allied Workers’ Union, the Operative Painters and Decorators’

Union of Australia and the Victorian Fibrous Plasterers and Plaster Workers’ Union.

A 1973 report records that the UMA had for some years avoided collecting trade union records, leaving the field of labour movement records to the Australian National University (ANU). However, direct contact with Melbourne-based unions in this year by Archives staff demonstrated many unions’ wish for a Melbourne based collecting institution, and recurring reports that some trade unions were destroying records also called for immediate action.

The report notes that 28 of 37 Melbourne-based unions responded favourably to transfer proposals. Five agreed to an immediate transfer of records, five to microfilming (the pre- ferred technological solution of the day), and 18 expressed ‘mild to enthusiastic’ interest in future lodgement of their records. Of the remainder, four were ‘undecided’ and five rejected proposals, two because they had an existing depositor relationship with the Australian National University and one because they had no records to transfer, having destroyed them when they moved office. It is pleasing that the only two unions reported in 1973 as refusing outright to consider lodging material with the UMA have subsequently both become depositors, one, the Australian Railways Union, transferring a highly significant collection.

The 1973 initiatives set a framework for future collecting by the UMA. In the last 30 years trade union collections have grown to collections from approximately 125 state, federal and regional branches of trade unions, comprising almost one kilometre of records.

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wo recent publications from the Baillieu Library’s Special Collections have highlighted the depth and diversity of our collections

— and the role of oral traditions in locating and interpreting historical records.

A New City: photographs of Melbourne’s land boom, published under MUP’s Miegunyah imprint, is a selection from an album held in Special Collections with commentaries by historians in various fields, including the UMA’s Dr Mark Richmond. The Curator of Special Collections Ian Morrison, who edited the book, writes in his introducto- ry essay of his fruitless attempts to find more than the most basic facts about the life of the photographer, Charles Bristow Walker. Birth, marriage and death records, along with a handful of other tantalising traces, show that Walker led an unusual life: married in Egypt in 1859,

A New City and the Baker of Maldon

News from Special Collections

Ian Morrison Curator of Special Collections

possibly worked in Florida in the 1860s, arrived in Melbourne in 1886, possibly provided images for artists working on Cassell’s Picturesque Australasia … Oral tradition always needs to be treated with caution, but the complete lack of it in the case of C.B. Walker meant that there was no narrative thread to follow in searching for records.

The subject of the Baillieu Library exhibition The Baker of Maldon is also someone about whom little is known. In 1903 the baker, George McArthur, bequeathed his substantial book collection to the University of Melbourne and his collection of artefacts to the Museum of Victoria. In response to the exhibition, documents in the possession of the family are being donated to the University.

These include fragments of two satiric poems, McArthur’s will and suicide note, as well as copies of family photographs.

Above: ‘University’, C.B. Walker, c.1888. Published in A New City.

Miegunyah Press, 2003; right: the catalogue cover from the recent exhibition, The Baker of Maldon.

The poems — one on marriage, the other on church-going — have a Byronic fluid- ity to them; if they are McArthur’s work, they establish him as a talented versifier.

And the strained simplicity of the suicide note makes terrible but compelling reading: he writes that he ‘can bear this horrible depression no longer’ — and hopes to be forgiven. When scrutinised in the light of oral traditions, which in McArthur’s case are quite plentiful, these documents add considerably to our understanding of this eccentric biblio- phile whose bequest formed the basis of the University’s rare book collections.

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UMA Bulletin

Editor: Jason Benjamin Layout: Jacqui Barnett

Produced by: Communications and Publications Section, Information Division, University of Melbourne ISSN 1320 5838

The University of Melbourne Archives University of Melbourne, Victoria 3010, Australia

Opening Hours: Mon, Tue, Thu, 9.00 am—5.00 pm; Wed 9.00 am—8.00 pm Phone: (03) 8344 6848

Fax: (03) 9347 8627

E-mail: archives@archives.unimelb.edu.au

Website: http://www.lib.unimelb.edu.au/collections/archives/archgen.html

History in the Field at UMA

Damien Williams History in the Field student 2003

D

uring second semester 2003 the UMA played host to two students enrolled in the University of Melbourne Department of History subject, History in the Field.

The objective of this course is to introduce students to the prac- tices of the conservation, communication and public heritage concerns of history in the field through a placement in a public or private sector work environment. Two students, Kylie McGregor and Damien Williams, worked on projects that con- centrated on promoting and making accessible the collections of the UMA. Kylie produced a finding aid to the UMA collections relating to Fitzroy, and Damien staged a small exhibition on the Victorian Labor College. Here Damien gives an insight into his time at the UMA.

A Student’s Perspective

As a student in the Department of History’s History in the Field subject, I was placed at the UMA for semester two and worked on the Victorian Labor College collection for the purpose of a small exhibition to be displayed in the foyer of the Ballieu Library. The historical practice that I employed used both primary and secondary sources, yet they were more diverse and somewhat more difficult to find than those I would normally use for academic assignments. Some of the archival material was only briefly catalogued and it meant that I had to gain a clear idea of what was contained in each document, working within the time that I had allowed. Developing these new skills was one of the most positive aspects of my placement. I had to be able to write material that was clear, concise and free from theoretical jargon. This was especially the case when I was taking notes, and

later, when I wrote labels to complement the display. I’ve learned over this period that public historians have to be able to grasp opportunities where and when they arise. My job was made much easier by chance conversations with people such as Stuart Macintyre and the accumulated experience of Dr Mark Richmond, Trevor Hart and Tony Miller at the UMA. They were able to recommend sources that would otherwise have taken me a long time to find. I should also thank Jason Benjamin and Bob Hocking for their assistance in this project.

My consideration of audience was the greatest factor in determining how the exhibition was finally displayed. I would argue that public historians must adjust their whole project to the audience, within the boundaries established by the client. It is very hard to convey a story if the words do not match what is on display. Audiences are fickle and it is very hard to gain the atten- tion of a person who does not have a specific interest in the topic.

For this reason I decided to separate the display into four main themes: the Brodneys, the students, the origins and aims of the College, and the Victorian Labor College and the University. The latter I considered appropriate for the display because it provided a link between the topic, the client and the University. It was also my way of presenting a different angle to previous exhibits celebrating the sesquicentenary of the University of Melbourne;

in particular the point that there has not always been consensus about the value of university education within the labour movement.

Damien’s exhibition will be on display in the Baillieu Library foyer until the end of December.

UMA - Digitised Collections - University of Melbourne