Bulletin of The University of Melbourne Archives
UMA
No. 12, June 2003
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n 2000 the University of Melbourne Archives (UMA) in partnership with the Noel Butlin Archives Centre at the Australian National University, Monash University’s School of Information Management & Systems, University of Wollongong Archives and the University of Melbourne’s Australian Science and Technology Heritage Centre received an ARC REIF grant to construct an Internet gateway to information on the location of trade union archives. Work on the project progressed throughout 2001.The result of this work is the Australian Trade Union Archives (ATUA), which was launched last April by Justice Giudice, President of the Australian Industrial Relations Commission. Intended to assist researchers and scholars of labour history, the gateway was designed to link together histor- ical detail, archival resources, published material and current information about Australian industrial organisations. In particu- lar trade unions and employer bodies. The website can be found at <www.atua.org.au/atua.html>.
In December 2002 the UMA was awarded the Sir Rupert Hamer Records Management Award, one of four awards offered annually by the Public Records Advisory Council to agencies in each of the inner budget, outer budget, local government and regional/rural areas. The award recognises excellence and inno- vation in records management in the Victorian public sector. Sponsored by the Records Management Association of Australia (Victorian Branch), the award is made to agencies achieving the following objectives:
• preservation of records of permanent value, including adher- ence to Public Record Office Victoria records management standards and ensuring government accountability; and
• innovations in records management practices, including effi- cient delivery of service to clients and facilitation of access to current information in a cost-effective manner.
Australian Trade Union Archives Website Wins Award
Bruce Smith
Project Manager ATUA
Recipients of the Sir Rupert Hamer Records Management Award.
Left to right: Barbara Flett (Land Title Office), Bruce Smith (Project Manager ATUA), Claire Sandell (Casey Cardinia Library Corporation) and Michael Piggott (UMA)
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 Summer Opening Hours: Mon, Tue, Thu, Fri 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
UMA on Show
Jason Benjamin Acting Administration Officer
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he first half of 2003 has seen a number of publications, exhibitions and displays utilising and profiling items held by the UMA.Celebration of the University’s 150th has been the impetus for various publications on the University, many of which have drawn on the UMA’s collections for source material and illustration. Of particular note is Treasures(Edited by Chris McAuliffe and Peter Yule), which highlights the cultural collections of the University. Included in the many treasures show- cased in this book are ten items from the Archives with accompanying text by UMA staff.
Since the beginning of the year the UMA has assisted in a number of exhibitions through the loaning of collection items. These included the Baillieu Library exhibition ‘What a Place for an Education’ and the exhibi- tion celebrating the Melbourne Threatre Company’s 50th anniversary.
The UMA also participated in Law Week this year (10–17 May) with an exhibition held at the Supreme Court Library of items related to Law educa- tion at the University and with a display at the Law Institute of Victoria’s offices in Bourke Street.
Exhibitions currently incorporating UMA collection items include
‘Curiosity: 150 years of collection at the University of Melbourne’, showing at the University’s Ian Potter Museum of Art, and the Gold Treasury Museum exhibition ‘Melbourne: a city built on gold’.
Currently on display at University House is a selection of Australia To-Day original cover design paintings from the Commercial Travellers Association of Australia collection.
C. Dudley Wood’s ‘Steelworks’ (The Commercial Travellers’ Association collec- tion), one of the Australia To-Day artworks currently on display at University House.
Present and future for ‘Keys to the Past’
Dr Mark Richmond Archivist
scanned from a variety of sources, and in this respect a late bonus was received with the transfer at the end of 2002 of a large quantity of photo- graphs from the University’s Media and Publications Services office, together with funding for the services of graphics expert Lindsay Howe, who was able to provide scans for later Keys where previous UMA image resources were increasingly thin.
Finally, the task of mount- ing the text and images into a website format was undertaken by Acting Deputy Archivist Bruce Smith, using the Web Academic Resource Publisher (WARP) software developed within the University by the Australian Science and Technology Heritage Centre (Austehc).
These combined efforts will enable Keys to ‘go public’ on the Internet mid year, further adding to the many rich sources of information being published about the University for the 150th celebrations.
However, that is not quite the end of the story. It is planned during the remain- der of 2003 to add several supplements that go some way to redressing the some- what ‘official’ nature of the content to be initially unveiled. This will involve fur- ther texts and images which focus more on students and student activities and organisations, and on the personal papers and stories of past staff members.
Keys will be accessible via the UMA’s website at <http://www.lib.
unimelb.edu.au/collections/archives/
archgen.html>.
The delivery of Carolyn’s texts was completed in the second half of 2002, and Dr Mark Richmond continued on with the task of gradually adding a list of UMA sources for each ‘Key’, and of identifying and placing visual images at appropriate places in the text, many of the images being already available elec- tronically online in the University of Melbourne Archives Image Catalogue (UMAIC); as well, each Key was linked to the most relevant other Keys on the site.
While many images were already available in UMAIC, others had to be
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s reported in an ear- lier UMA Bulletin, the UMA was suc- cessful in obtaining a funding grant from the first round of applications to the Small Projects Grant Program as part of the preparations for the cele- bration in 2003 of the University’s 150th anniversary.The application, prepared by Dr Mark Richmond, was for funding to commission an author to prepare a text which would comprise an annotated and illus- trated guide to UMA’s holdings relating to the history of the University, the result to be mounted as a website rather than published in book form. The UMA was able to secure the ser- vices of prominent historian Dr Carolyn Rasmussen, whose many publications include (with John Poynter), A Place Apart.
The University of Melbourne:
Decades of Challenge (MUP, 1996).
As work proceeded, the project con- tent became less source-driven and assumed the shape more of a roughly chronological outline of the development of the University with pointers to UMA’s holdings at all the key stages of that development, concentrating on gover- nance, the academic program and its expansion, and the changing built envi- ronment, with sidelights on subjects such as the colleges, student and staff organi- sations and activities, and engagement with the wider community. The time frame covered was circa 1853 to the late 1970s (being the period covered in the official University records so far transferred to the Archives).
University Muniments – Grant of Arms, 1863.
University Photograph collection (UMA/I/1681)
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n April 2002, in the Jim Potter Conference Room at the University of Melbourne, the President of the Australian Industrial Relations Commission, Judge Geoffrey Giudice, launched the Australian Trade Union Archives gateway. A website for archival and print information about trade unions and collections, it was developed during 2001 by five university partners who were either experts in metadata or who held trade union archives. The University of Melbourne Archives (UMA) coordinated the project and now maintains the website<www.atua.org.au>.
Just over a year later, the UMA is cel- ebrating involvement in another — and even bigger — national subject gateway venture. On 19 June we will officially become the 25th member of PictureAustralia, the image gateway coordinated by the National Library of Australia. The development is highly sig- nificant, as we are the first Victorian uni- versity to join, following the University of Queensland and James Cook University, and incidentally will be adding twice their combined numbers of scanned images to the total accessible via PictureAustralia. While we are also, in effect, the first university archives to join, we trust other in-house cultural col- lections will take advantage of our gener- ic membership. In this way the extensive collections of pictures, photographs and other visual items held by areas such as the University’s Ian Potter Museum of Art, the Grainger Museum and the Medical History Museum can be shared with the wider public in Australia and internationally.
Joining PictureAustralia will deliver benefits to both parties. Membership gives the UMA access to a massive
population of potential inquiries, vastly disproportionate to the searches made of our existing online images catalogue.
Sharing collections with the wider public has always been an important University of Melbourne objective, but in our 150th anniversary year, even more so. Scans of photos from the UMA’s University relat- ed holdings have already featured in the popular ‘150 Years; 150 Stories’ series appearing in 2002 and this year in UniNews and on the sesquicentenary website. The appearance in May of three new publications on aspects of the University’s history also bears testi- mony to the richness of the UMA’s photographic collections.
Indirectly, the UMA will derive additional advantage from its PictureAustralia membership through the inevitable boost it will give to the case for work on images in the collection yet to be scanned, described and properly
re-housed. Almost all of the 5573 acces- sions that make up the collection include photographs. But the University’s own photographers aside, among the richest collections are those resulting from com- mercial photographs. They include 80 boxes of images, mostly 5”x7” glass neg- atives covering the 1890s to the 1940s of Adams Studios of Benalla and 15 metres of negatives including portraits, events, landscapes, automobiles and so on from the 1940s–1960s by the Collins Street photographer Edwin Adamson. And in a category all of its own is the archive of 12,000 negatives and prints dating from the early 1970s of the protest photographer John Ellis.
By enabling access to our images, we trust the totality of PictureAustralia’s database will also be enhanced. While our crude number count of scanned images is puny compared with that of the largest member’s contribution (2,800 as against the State Library of Victoria’s 174,500), the UMA adds a dimension so far poorly represented in the combined image databases of PictureAustralia’s membership. After June, photos relating to the University itself become available, significant because of the place it occu- pies as Australia’s second oldest and until 1960 Victoria’s only university. But it is our Ellis collection relating to peace and protest, including good representation of the Vietnam Moratorium protest move- ment, which we trust will truly enrich the distributed collections. Prior to the UMA joining PictureAustralia a search on the name ‘Albert Langer’ drew a nil return via the PictureAustralia search engine.
That has now changed, and because com- munity, trade union and political protest is an important and enduring theme in Australia’s past, that will be all to the good.
Pictures and Words
Michael Piggott University Archivist
One of the Langer images now available through PictureAustralia.
Albert Langer at the United States Omega base rally at Yarram, 1979.
John Ellis collection (UMA/I/254)
Every two months the National Library gathers this metadata from each participating agency using metadata harvesting soft- ware. Once gathered, the metadata is stored at the National Library in Extensible Markup Language format (XML). An index is built using this metadata which PictureAustralia users search when accessing the service. The preview or ‘thumbnail’
images in search results are retrieved from participating agencies web sites at the time of a search and are not held centrally at the Library.
The joining of UMAIC to PictureAustralia has been a com- bined effort of people from across the University’s Information Division and the National Library. Vital to the project from the University were Dr Trevor Hales and Rick Westcott from Library Systems Development, Eve Young from the Information Acquisition & Organisation Section and, from the National Library, Jennifer Anderson and Simon Jacob.
PictureAustralia can be found at <http://www.
pictureaustralia.org/index.html>.
Clockwise: Professor Thomas Howell Laby. University Photograph collection (UMA/I/1975); Main Building and Lake , circa 1870. University Photograph collection (UMA/I/1444); Helen Garner at the People for Nuclear Disarmament rally, March 1983. John Ellis collection (UMA/I/602), and Old Wilson Hall, circa 1901. University Photograph collection (UMA/I/1002)
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he recent linking of the University of Melbourne Archives Image Catalogue (UMAIC) to the national image gateway PictureAustralia has been a significant project that will vastly improve access to the UMA’s image collections.UMAIC was initially launched in November 2001 with the aim to eventually make as many photographs and images as possible available online. The largest collec- tion currently available on UMAIC is the University of Melbourne image collection that includes approximately 1400 images of
University buildings, events and people. Other important collections include 1000 images from the John Ellis photograph collection of peace and protest movements, as well as images from trade union and architectural collections.
PictureAustralia is an Internet based service hosted by the National Library of Australia that allows many significant online pictorial collections to be searched at the same time. This gate- way provides access to images that cover all aspects of Australiana and includes artworks, photographs and objects.
Overall there are 25 participating agencies in the gateway from across Australia and abroad. Included are the National Library, National Archives and National Gallery of Australia, the State Libraries of Victoria, Tasmania and NSW, the Australian War Memorial, the National Library of New Zealand and the Scottish Cultural Resource Network (SCRAN).
When searching PictureAustralia you are in fact searching the collections of all the participating agencies. The search result retrieves preview images that allow you to easily view the results of your search. When you click on one of these preview or
‘thumbnail’ images you are taken to the web site of the relevant agency to view the full-size version. For example, a search on
‘Baillieu Library’ will retrieve preview images from all the agen- cies that hold material relevant to that search term. For the above example this includes images sourced from the National Library of Australia, the State Library of Victoria and now the UMA.
Each image accessible through PictureAustralia is held on a participating agency’s web site and is displayed as part of a web page. The page includes the image itself and information that describes the image using the Dublin Core metadata format.
Joining PictureAustralia
Jason Benjamin
Acting Administration Officer
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ncluded in a strange and thought provoking exhibition on film and remembrance cur- rently at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image on Federation Square is an observation of Soren Kierkegaard’s, that we live life forwards but understand it backwards. Sometimes I think that within the broad church of recordkeeping professionals, that’s one of the tradition- al archivists’ key roles — helping with the backwards understanding, leaving records management specialists to foster good standards and practices in the here and now. Within the university context, that understanding hopefully comes from teaching, learning and research.Archivists have been typified in many other ways of course: historian manqué, shapers of societal memory, unpaid research assistants, even at times cultural visigoths for our more con- tentious records destructions. When our colleague at the University of Wollongong Archivist Michael Organ became the first Greens MHR in 2001, the media’s profiling of his background implied he was a sort of historian. In her novel The Archivist (Abacus, 1998), Martha Cooley represents us as a half scholar, half manuscripts/rare books librarian with a photographic memory, solitary personality and strange ideas about protecting access to collections.
For all that, we are important to a func- tioning society and a functioning univer- sity, and no more so than during organ- ised backwards glances associated with major anniversaries.
Kierkegaard’s kind of understanding inevitably happens through making con- nections, identifying relationships, and understanding their meaning and signifi- cance. Yet present and past are also
interconnected in a myriad of ways; the world today is steeped in associations with near and distant yesterdays. Taking a most mundane instance, these thoughts were drafted initially in the ‘Deep Dish’
café in the University’s 1888 building, a place whose name says it all, and which carries for the author strong personal/family associations given its earlier role as a teachers’ college. There are also professional links of a sort, because our former acting Deputy University Archivist began his academic career teaching archives and records management from the top floor of the east wing of the building.
I was further reminded of the range of archivists’ role types during the University’s Community Open Weekend in early May, the highlight of the year’s 150th celebrations. In a sense, the whole year places the UMA on centre stage, for authoritative knowledge of that span of years is essentially based on historical documents. Apart from helping provide archival material for the two new histo- ries (Dick Selleck’s The Shop and the updated short history by him and Stuart Macintyre), UMA staff with help from Dr Carolyn Rasmussen have produced our own historical representation called
‘Keys to the Past’, complete with multi- ple links and references to our own collections and other sources.
The powerful utility of archives aside, it is in fact possible for shared memory to take us, in a single degree of separation, back to the University’s very beginning. We can imagine someone of senior years today recalling having lis- tened, as a child, while someone of senior years recounted watching, years earlier, the University’s ceremonial open- ing at the Exhibition Building in the
mid-1850s. Similarly, those who remem- ber watching Ken Burns’ 1990 documen- tary on the American Civil War might remember the remarkable ‘second hand’
eyewitness accounts from that conflict.
Recollected memories are one thing, but the 1855–1882 register listing the names of the first students who attended the University is quite another. The regis- ter was recently on displayed as part of
‘What a Place for an Education!’, the second of a series of exhibitions scheduled to run throughout the year at the Baillieu Library focusing on the University’s history. It was clearly evi- dent, watching visitors to the exhibition during that open weekend, that the regis- ter, with its formal ‘thin up and thick down’ handwritten names was the num- ber one attraction. Photographs and maps were also very popular, especially to former students. They functioned, so it seemed, like a corporate photo album triggering some of their happiest memories.
For historians, however, archival documents have the advantage over rec- ollections of being generated as things happened. They have a quality of bureau- cratic ingenuousness. Even so, they are neither free of bias, nor infallible. For example Sir Edward Dunlop, the renown surgeon and POW, disputed his student record card showing Pathology results for 1933, and his biographer Sue Ebury was inclined to believe him (Weary; The Life of Sir Edward Dunlop, Penguin 1995, pp. 80 and 653). His prodigious memory, evidence of corrected clerical errors and the implications of his overall class ranking all suggested a mistake.
Nevertheless, the collection of 1.5 kilometres of official University records (including tens of thousands of
Reflections sesquicentennial and archival
Michael Piggott
University Archivist
occasionally less than perfect student cards) represents the foundation bedrock on which so much can be known of the past 150 years. The accumulation began slowly, before the telephone and before the typewriter was in common use. The much quoted description of Council’s first seven years of deliberations com- prising a single 134 folio volume of min- utes says it all. From those beginnings, however, the development of the University has seen a parallel expansion of the records, stimulated in part by the appearance then rapid adoption of copy- ing and communication technology.
Eventually dedicated archives and then records management programs were established. It was not long before the UMA also began adding material to com- plement the official archival record and the papers of academics and administra- tors, among the earliest being records of the Princess Ida Club and the University of Melbourne Public Questions Society.
Our challenge must be to see that all these collections are secure and accessi- ble, and to ensure that the next major anniversary can be equally well served by archives.
RHSV Summer School Visits UMA
The annual summer school held by the Royal Historical Society of Victoria once again visited the UMA for a successful introductory talk and tour of the Archives’ Dawson Street repository.
Conducted by Dr Mark Richmond the tour lasted for two hours and gave the group an overview of the UMA’s holdings, reference services and facilities.
Held over three days in January the summer school is a popular annual event that attracts a diverse range of people from students, historians, school teachers and archivists.
Staff News
Jane Ellen Archivist
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here have been some recent staff changes at UMA. In January, admin- istrative officer and multi-tasker extraordinaire, Liz Agostino, took up a twelve month secondment as Manager of International Programs at the University’s Australian Centre. Ably filling her shoes is former repository officer, Jason Benjamin, while Tony Miller formerly ofANZ Bank Archive is acting in Jason’s role at the repository.
Deputy University Archivist, Suzanne Fairbanks, who has been on twelve months’
maternity leave, returned on 14 May. She will work for three days a week initially and Bruce Smith, who has been Acting Deputy, will share the position for the duration until Suzanne resumes full-time duties at the end of June.
Sarah Brown continues to combine her position as Labour Archivist, working two days a week at UMA, with her complementary role as Librarian at the Victorian Trades Hall Council for the rest of the week.
Lindsay Howe, former photographer at La Trobe University, has been working with us since the beginning of the year for two days a week digitising our collection of University photographs.
Top and below: Liz Agostino enjoying her new role at the Australian Centre with one of the international students under her care; Lindsay Howe, who, among other things, is listing and selectively digitising over 9000 images recently received from the University’s Media and
Publications Services office.
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n 2002 UMA received a dona- tion of records from the defunct Melbourne organisation, the Committee for the Restoration of Democracy in Greece.The Committee for the Defence of Democracy in Greece was established by members of the Melbourne Greek com- munity in 1965 as a response to the polit- ical crisis that had seen elected Greek president, George Papandreou, ousted by King Constantine. After the military coup of 21 April 1967, it became the Committee for the Restoration of Democracy in Greece. It acted as a broad-based lobby group to unite all Greek-Australian opposition to the dicta- torship and to engage Australian politi- cians and trade unions into adopting a stance of active opposition. It had con- tacts with other Greek resistance groups in Europe and sponsored visits by resis- tance leaders Tony Ambaticlos and Markos Dragoumis in 1970, Mikis Theodorakis in 1972 and Andreas Papandreou in 1974. Its earlier attempt to bring out another resistance leader, Nikos
Nikolaides, in 1967 was foiled by the Liberal government of the day.
The Committee’s activities ceased in 1975 following the fall of the Greek dic- tatorship in November 1974 and the restoration of democracy soon after.
The collection was donated by the former secretary of the Committee, Denis Sikiotis, with some additional material from Plutarch Deliyannis. It contains the Committee minutes for 1967–1974; correspondence with Australian politicians and with Greek resistance organisations and individuals in Europe; internal correspondence between Committee members; tran- scripts of talks and speeches; press cut- tings; photographs and flyers. The mate- rial is in Greek and English. The records reflect not only the workings of the Committee and its counterparts abroad but also the impact the dictatorship had on the lives of some Greek-Australians and of the divisions it opened up in the community here.
The Greek military dictatorship of 1967–1974 was the final episode in a
Committee for the Restoration of Democracy in Greece protest, circa 1970. Pedonis Photo Studio
Committee for the Restoration of Democracy in Greece
Jane Ellen Archivist
chain of events that began with the for- mation of both leftist and rightist resis- tance armies fighting against the German occupation of Greece in the Second World War and which was followed by the savage post-war reprisals that led the country into civil war in 1948. The peri- od of the dictatorship saw the first overt and cohesive political activity taken up by Greek-Australians.
While UMA has few records from non English-speaking organisations, the collection sits comfortably within our policy of collecting the records of com- munity and political organisations.
The records of the Committee for the Restoration of Democracy in Greece would support research into what was a significant episode within the Greek- Australian community or a broader study of how political events in the homeland are played out within émigré communities.
The collection has been listed and is available for access.
