Prof. EW Russell
Consultant historian, PROV
Member of Public Records Advisory Council

Today is the centenary of the first transfer of public records for preservation to the Public Library of Victoria on 31 July 1903, an event that until recently our generation didn’t know about or had forgotten. Having had the pleasure and privilege of working on the history of these archives for some months earlier this year, I’d like to share with you some of the excitement and discovery associated with that project.

What we had not lost sight of was that this year is also the thirtieth anniversary of the proclamation of the Public Records Act 1973, and in preparation for that event, which occurred in April, Ross Gibbs late last year was giving consideration to how the event should be celebrated, and which founders of the archives in Victoria ought to be celebrated on the occasion.

We exchanged a number of emails, discussing the various claims to fame of Ernest Scott, Harrison Moore, Alfred Greig, Don Baker, and Harry Nunn. All of these of course, played critical roles.

With characteristic panache, Ross Gibbs decided that the anniversary justified some work on the history of the office, and just before Christmas, he put together the team of Charlie Farrugia and me to work on the project. Ross Gibbs thought I might remember some of the detail of the period before there was a public record office or a series system from the earlier part of my career, and Charlie would be able to contribute his vast knowledge of the records from his years of experience. I represented the time when there were no real finding aids, and you had to know the 35 km of records we then had by means of intuition, memory and guesswork. Charlie represents the time when there are 82 km of records to know, but a series system and other finding aids to help you do this.

We decided at once to embark on an ‘archival history’. That is, we decided to apply the archival mind to the history of the office. We decided to approach the task not by looking at published sources and books, but to go straight to the records and build up our basic story from them. We shared the archivist’s conviction that the answers are there in the records if only you can formulate the question to ask! So we decided to build our story out from the collection itself – to discover how the collection was built up, and move from there to an understanding of the other elements – the buildings, the systems, the people, the legislation, and the various epic struggles and campaigns they fought.

The process worked beyond our wildest expectations, and we found discovery after discovery. This afternoon I want to share just a few of these discoveries with you and try to suggest to your imagination some of the rich depth that the story of Public Record Office Victoria (PROV) really does hold. The story of records and archives in Victoria is a long one. Though we now have a fantastic body of records, amazingly skilled staff and a beautiful archive building, for many of the last 167 years there have been threats that those who believed in archives had to ward off. Over those years records were often well managed and preserved, but were sometimes burnt, pulped, dumped, stolen, sold, swapped, traded, eaten by rats, eaten by termites, or shat upon by birds.

To implement this archives-based approach to PROV’s history, we chose to begin by asking the question ‘When and where did the collection begin?’ This is not so easy a question to answer, because although the archives section commenced a numerical accessions book in 1955, there is no complete chronological record of archives received by the Public Library before that date. Many millions of files and registers, maps, plans and photographs had been transferred to the Library before 1955 – but where should we start? Published library histories sometimes referred to the acquisition of the records of the Melbourne branch of the Derwent Bank in 1883 as a starting point… but of course these were not public records.

Luckily, I recalled noticing thirty years ago that some old registers in PROV carried six digit Public Library accession numbers. In 1970, I had started noting these, trying to establish the pattern of the collection. This year, we were able to do this systematically, starting with all of those older records we could identify through lists contained in library annual reports, catalogues such as that compiled in 1948 by students at the Melbourne history school, and through access to the correspondence files of the Public Library. Later, once we had been able to list over 800 of these registers, we sought access to the original accession books of the Public Library to cross check, and at length we were able to establish a reasonably comprehensive spreadsheet of dozens of early accessions. It soon became clear that this was a robust method for establishing the very early growth of the collection at a time when it only comprised bound volumes. These the library staff processed carefully most of the time. It was only when massive volumes of files started being transferred in the 1920s that the accession book system started to falter, and during World War II, as a control system for archives at least, it crashed altogether.

But this methodology established the early pattern, and pointed us clearly towards the convict indents as the real beginning of the collection, to 31 July 1903 as the key date to be celebrated, and to Alfred William Howitt, George Dunderdale, Chief Librarian E La Touche Armstrong and Secretary to the Law Department Matthew Byrne as key figures. It pointed to important events therefore, 25 years earlier than the conventional association of the beginnings of the archives with the 1909 beginnings of the Historical Society of Victoria. And it made a fascinating connection with the tiny township of Alberton in Gippsland. Searching the registers of the Law Department for details of the transfer of the convict indents, we came upon the entries that pointed us to Alberton, Alfred Howitt, and the year 1883.

Alfred William Howitt, one of the towering figures of nineteenth-century Victoria, had been rewarded for his bravery in the search for Burke and Wills with the Police Magistracy of Gippsland, and for the next 28 years he roamed from Omeo to Bairnsdale to Alberton on his journeys. Howitt was a member of a prolific family of authors and people of interest. He himself was a Fellow of the Geographical Society and his studies of the Aborigines in Gippsland, such as the 819 page Native Tribes of South Eastern Australia, are seminal works. Later he became Secretary for Mines, Audit Commissioner and Public Service Board member.

In December 1883, Howitt was on his rounds at Alberton, and his Clerk of Courts there was one George Dunderdale, himself the author of three books published in London as well as many other articles.

These two literary men found themselves together in the already declining village of Alberton, once the gateway to Gippsland. The courthouse, like much else in the village, was showing its age. The shingle roof had begun to collapse. And through the missing shingles, flights of swallows flew in and deposited their droppings on the records of the court.

In an old letter book of the Alberton courthouse, we found a copy of Howitt’s 1883 letter to the Secretary of the Law Department advising that:

Since my last visit I find that the roof has lost a number of shingles and that independently of the rain which falls through the holes caused thereby, numbers of swallows enter the building, which is now in such an extremely filthy state from their droppings that one room alone remains fit for use. Mr Dunderdale informs me that he has difficulty in finding a place in the buildings in which to store the records.

Several months later, Dunderdale carefully listed the old Alberton court records, and this list has survived, as a loose folded double foolscap sheet within the Alberton letter book. It discloses that in April 1884 he sent to the Law Department eleven volumes of convict indents; another register disclosed that they were conveyed by the coastal schooner Twins. It appears that these volumes remained in the Law Department until 31 July 1903 when they were transferred to the Public Library and formed on that date the commencement of its collection of public records. Hence 31 July 2003 is the anniversary of the state archives currently in PROV’s custody. They are now VPRS 107 – but these 10 volumes are really the foundation. In this way, the Law Department, represented in our line-up of speakers today by John Charleson, earned its status as really one of the founding partners of the Victorian archival enterprise, a claim reinforced many times later.

By this time, 1903, the Public Library was under the leadership of that great librarian Edmund La Touche Armstrong, whom we have to thank for the Library’s dome and for its adoption of the Dewey system; but he was also the ambivalent founder of our public archive, his own hand-written note of accession being bound into the first volume of the first group of records transferred. He was ambivalent, for although he had applied his own energy to looking for Australian manuscripts and sources, he was not sure that it was the Library’s job to be starting an archive. Such a task he saw as the task for a public record office. But it is to his credit that, whatever his misgivings, he did allow the collection to begin and grow; and his successors Douglass Boys, Ernest Pitt, William Baud and Colin McCallum over the next half-century continued that development, although usually with limited resources, makeshift accommodation, and very real difficulties of every sort. The Library’s role as the first state archive, the topic of a later paper this afternoon, was a real and extensive one, one of the many profound contributions it has made to the cultural life of the state.

After the Law Department and the Public Library, the next player to appear on this stage, around 1909, was the Historical Society of Victoria. These developments were quite easy to piece together from the comprehensive Premier’s Department files on the matter as well as the excellent early minute books and correspondence of the Historical Society of Victoria (now the Royal Historical Society of Victoria, or RHSV).

In April 1909, WJ Hughston of 157 Victoria Rd, Hawthorn East, wrote to The Argus about the need to preserve the reminiscences of the early colonists. Hughston’s letter struck a note with Alfred Greig, who wrote to Hughston and asked if they could meet. So on 7 April 1909, Hughston and Greig met beneath the portico of the Melbourne Public Library to talk over the idea of an historical society. They then went round to see the extraordinary EA Petherick, who was presiding over his collection of Australiana at the exhibition buildings, and at length, an inaugural meeting was held in Furlong’s meeting rooms in Royal Arcade on 21 May 1909, with Professor Harrison Moore as President, Alfred Deakin as Vice-President (two weeks away from his second term as Prime Minister of Australia), and the banker and author of the three-volume History of Victoria, Henry Gyles Turner, as second Vice-President. Gyles Turner was then in his 80s; his career reached back into the 1840s when in London he had been an apprentice with William Pickering of the famous Aldine Press.

Months into the existence of the Society, at its April 1910 meeting, Professor Ernest Scott raised the question of the preservation of official records, and though this was not among the founding objects of the Society in a prominent way, it became a central activity for the Society over the next decades. Scott’s view of history has been described by Katharine Fitzpatrick in these terms: ‘The essence of the new method of studying history was the importance attached to primary sources, documents contemporary with the historical events in question, in preference to the later reflections of historians on these events. History was to cease to be the historian’s individual view and to become history without the historian, the record, free from subjective influences or interpretation, of what actually happened.’ With such an historical method as a starting point, good archives would be of paramount importance.

Scott’s view of the importance of records, based on this approach to history, helped to focus the Historical Society on official records, and this had many results. These included the survey of official records published in the May 1912 issue of the Victorian Historical Magazine, a long campaign specifically focused at the creation of a ‘state records office’, continued pressure on the Public Library to develop archives, and, in 1919, a campaign to secure, as the site for the future archives of Victoria, the open space between Parliament House and Albert St in East Melbourne, now public gardens.

Meanwhile, the Secretary of the Society, Alfred Greig, had become interested in the early history of Gippsland, and because he himself was a meticulous record keeper, it was possible for us to piece together the link between RHSV and the rest of the pile of records in Alberton courthouse. The rest of the records listed by Dunderdale in 1884 stayed in Alberton, but later some of them reached Melbourne. It emerged that Alfred Greig had established the first country branch of the Society in Yarram, and had been instrumental in acquiring, also from the Secretary to the Law Department, further records from the pile in Alberton courthouse. You can imagine my excitement at finding among these an item of correspondence of 1844 carrying the Historical Society’s accession no. 1. So we realized with some awe that accession no. 1 of the archives of the Royal Historical Society of Victoria also came from the same source as accession no. 1 of PROV. Two of the most important collections of archives in the state came from that pile of records in the tiny roofless courthouse at Alberton!

Finally, some words about what we discovered as to the role of the history school of the University of Melbourne in saving records from destruction at the beginning of World War II. Again, we knew there was a story to be told about the role of the history school during World War II, but what was that role? And, using our records-based methodology, exactly what were the records saved? Do they still exist, and where are they? These are some of the issues we pursued.

Several years ago, a conference of historians was held to celebrate the life and work of Ernest Scott’s successor, Professor Max Crawford. The history school and the historical profession have made a big contribution to the development of archives, and at this conference the claim was made by one historian that Professor Crawford had ‘saved half the court records in the state’ from being pulped. Apparently, Crawford had attended a final honours seminar late in his career and told the students that he regarded his contribution to saving the records during World War II as one of his greatest achievements. But did he save ‘half the court records of the state’?

As we looked at Victorian public records during wartime, much of interest became clear, including the roles played by Gwyn James, Max Crawford, but also other fascinating aspects of record keepers’ responses to the threat of war to their records.

The reactions to war of Victorian government record keepers were diverse and resourceful. Several took to the new-fangled microfilm. Others, like the state taxation commissioner, were sure that their modern concrete buildings would be bomb proof. Some, like the Titles Office, moved significant records to remote storage: Beechworth in the case of the Titles Office, and the Bank of Australasia at Euroa in the case of the Melbourne Harbour Trust.

But there also was a wartime pulping program, reported on in sensational terms by the Ballarat Courier on 5 September 1940, a report that soon spread to the metropolitan press. The Courier reported that 8 tons of records were being destroyed and were out on the verandah of the courthouse. Promptly, Crawford called a meeting with Ernest Pitt, the Chief Librarian of the Public Library and a request was sent to the Secretary of the Law Department asking that the records have a delayed sentence. Gwyn James from the History Department sped down to the pulpers, but reported that nothing could be done.

It was a great moment, and it drew the government’s attention to the historical importance of records that may be destroyed. Pitt was appointed to chair a board of inquiry and in 1944 he recommended that archival legislation be passed. It wasn’t; the Parliamentary Draftsman at the last minute persuaded the Chief Secretary that no such legislation was necessary.

But did Crawford save half the court records of the state? Not really, though his role was important. The destructions in Ballarat in 1940 were of lower court files, and were part of a planned destruction of records ordered back in 1936. The registers were not destroyed, and the records (or rather the registers) from Maryborough, Bealiba, Dunolly, Avoca and Beaufort that had initially sparked James’s concern, were ultimately transferred to the archives 28 years later! But more than that, in this project we have carefully looked through the archives accessions of the wartime period and while there were various normal transfers, there were virtually no court records transferred during the war. In relation to court records, it is simply the case that the 1936 instructions were upheld. So Crawford may have made a big contribution, but not quite the one some historians have asserted.

In his rush to the Abbotsford pulping mill in 1940, James did retrieve some registers, but only a handful. Naturally we were keen to establish what became of the handful, the seven volumes in fact, of court records that Gwyn James and Max Crawford did manage to save in October 1940. In one of the many twists in this story, we ultimately discovered that two of them had made their way back to PROV. As for the others, they were finally discovered two months ago within the 58 metres of the remarkable Semmens collection, assembled by that bower bird of Creswick, Dr Edwin Semmens, and ultimately transferred to the University of Melbourne Archives!

Thus through the contributions of those two great professors, Ernest Scott and Max Crawford, the history school at Melbourne University too must be viewed as one of the founding partners of this archival project, and time and again since that interest and connection has been important.

The contributions of the four founding partners were key strands of the fabric supporting the conservation of our public records. But they were all just strands until, through the work of Harry Nunn and the statesmanship of Sir Rupert Hamer, both of whom are with us today, the binding framework of the Public Records Act 1973 brought them together and established the Public Record Office on the basis we are familiar with now.

All of the founding partners were once again participants in this important moment. The Law Department was a strong advocate of the outcome, and a former Secretary, HC Chipman, was a member of the committee that recommended the final legislation. The Public Library ultimately lent its support when the first State Librarian, Ken Horn, succumbed to Harry Nunn’s urging, and auspiced the committee that designed the Public Records Bill and saw it through. The Royal Historical Society lent its public support as the Bill went through the House, while the academic historians, now dispersed to Monash as well as Melbourne, mostly welcomed the Bill.

To all of us archivists at the time, the passage of the Bill was an inspiring moment. I felt it, all my colleagues felt it, Robin Sharman celebrated it in Archives and Manuscripts as ‘Victory in Victoria’ and clearly Dr Keith Penny, then Chief Archivist at the Commonwealth Archives, was also inspired.

On 7 November 1973, he sent a confidential note to ‘Harry’, signed ‘Keith’, suggesting that the time was right for the Commonwealth and the state to get together for the creation in Victoria of a strong centre of archives activity and one with an identity clear enough to achieve public recognition similar to that given to such accepted institutions such as libraries and art galleries; the development of a distinctive Australian or national technique of archives administration; the creation of a broad base of experience and activity on which to develop the professionalisation of archives; the possibility of interchange of staff; and the provision of a federal/state centre at which users could gain access to all major materials in the state.

Since 1973, the public archive in Victoria has grown threefold in size, and largely realised these ideals, including that of Commonwealth and state cooperation, of which it has become a model. PROV in these years became professionalised, achieved significant public recognition and finally came into full flower in this beautiful location in North Melbourne some three years ago.

Today, this symposium has been designed to call back the four founding partners disclosed by our research – the Law Department, the history school, the Royal Historical Society and the Public Library – to celebrate this important anniversary. In doing so, one should also pause to marvel the institution that has been created – surely a great triumph of cooperative historical conservation in a community to whom such things still matter deeply.

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