John Charleson
Deputy Secretary, Corporate Services, Victorian Department of Justice

Introduction
It has been fascinating to listen to the eminent speakers who have preceded me, and I hope that you will find my presentation interesting as well.

My name is John Charleson, and I am the Deputy Secretary, Corporate Services in the Victorian Department of Justice. I am standing in today for Penny Armytage, the Secretary of the Department, who unfortunately is unable to be with us this afternoon.

To give you a brief idea of what I do, I am responsible for supporting the work of Department of Justice business units by providing essential corporate services such as human resource and financial management, executive and business services. I am also responsible for co-ordinating key corporate activities such as budgets, industrial relations and capital planning across the wider portfolio. The field of records management lies under the business services area of my responsibilities.

To put it in a broader context, the Department of Justice is the successor to the ‘Law Department’ which you will have seen mentioned in the brochure for this symposium – and it encompasses a much more extensive range of activities than the former Law Department. One of the current nine Victorian Government departments, the Department of Justice was established in October 1992 – a little over ten years ago now – when the Kennett government came to power. It provides the organisational, policy and management focus towards achieving the government’s priority of building a safe and just Victoria, and currently includes a wide range of important functions such as crime prevention, police, courts, correctional services, emergency services, consumer affairs and, since last year’s state election, gambling regulation, liquor licencing and trade measurement.

The reason that I am speaking to you this afternoon of course is to celebrate the hundredth anniversary of the far-sighted transfer on this very day in 1903 of ten volumes of convict indent records from the then Law Department to the then Public Library of Victoria, which became the first holdings of Victoria’s fledgling state archives; and I am particularly pleased that original convict indent records and indexes to registered correspondence which kept track of where the records came from and where they were sent to are on display in the foyer today.

Ever since that historic first transfer of records, the management and preservation of records created by Victorian Government departments has become, and remains to this day, a significant on-going issue for both senior public servants such as myself and elected representatives. And as the successor to the Law Department, the Department of Justice has a very special connection among Victorian Government departments to the formation of the splendid archive now in the safe custody of Public Record Office Victoria.

Yesterday
I would like to trace for you now some of the key historical events in the development of the relationship between ourselves and Victoria’s state archives, with particular reference to the long involvement of the Law Department. In doing so, I will be drawing significantly on Bill Russell’s working draft ‘History of the Public Record Office of Victoria’ (May 2003), and I would like to thank Bill for making this comprehensive document available to me.

Again, to provide some more context for you, the Law Department was originally established in 1851, following the separation of Port Phillip from New South Wales. Two ministers were appointed at that time to administer the new department – William Stawell as Attorney-General and Redmond Barry as Solicitor-General, and the department began to function three years later. The public service moved slowly in those days – too many potential public servants were no doubt out and about searching for that elusive pot of gold!

Although for the period from 1861 to 1890 a third Minister of the Crown under the title of Minster of Justice assisted in the administration of the Law Department, it continued under dual administration until the passing of the Solicitor-General Act 1951, which provided for the appointment of the first Solicitor-General who was not also a Minister of the Crown. From that time on, the department was administered solely by the Attorney-General.

It is worth noting that in the Department of Justice’s library collection today we still have volumes bearing the bookplate of Ned Kelly’s nemesis, Sir Redmond Barry! It was Barry by the way, who, as President of the Library Trustees, declared one of John Batman's deeds acquired by the Library in 1879 as having ‘no intrinsic worth’! One would imagine that his opinion of the convict indents we are remembering today would have been no less charitable.

The Law Department was basically responsible for the provision of an efficient and effective legal system for the people of Victoria, mainly through administration of the courts. It was renamed the Attorney-General’s Department by the Cain government more than a hundred years later in 1987. The Attorney-General’s Department in turn was subsumed by the Department of Justice in 1992.

Along with the Public Library of Victoria, the Historical Society of Victoria, and the history school of the University of Melbourne, I am proud to record that the Law Department was one of the four key players which contributed in particular to the early protection of Victoria’s archives before the passage of the Public Records Act 1973 and the establishment of the Public Record Office.

The department was the first government agency to transfer any of its records to both the Public Library and the Historical Society, and instrumental in securing a provision in the Victorian Companies Act 1958 that could be regarded as the state’s first archival legislation. In addition, it was the source of critical contributions to the campaign for a public records Act, especially through the sterling efforts of one of its secretaries – Harold Carter Chipman.

In July 1903, the Chief Librarian of the Melbourne Public Library, Edward La Touche Armstrong, made history when he received from Matthew Byrne, Secretary of the Law Department at the time the first formal transfer of official records from a Victorian Government department to the Library. These records consisted of some ten volumes of convict indents. The battered books, now serialised as VPRS 107, were large in format, covered in old calf leather, and contained printed identities, ship by ship, of the convicts who had arrived in Sydney in the 1830s. By way of explanation, the indent record provides a summary of a convict's demographic and sentencing details, for example, their name, place of birth, occupation, and the offences for which they have been convicted and the length of the sentence involved. The term ‘prisoner indent report’ is still in use today in the correctional services area of the Department of Justice. Armstrong made notes about their administrative significance, and indeed his handwritten comments have survived to this day, bound into one of the volumes, thereby completing the initiation of the Victorian archives.

Armstrong favoured the establishment of a public record office at the time (some seventy years before it came to fruition), but he did not want to build an archive in the Library. Although he appears to have failed to recognise the seminal significance of the convict indents in Victoria’s archival history, he was nevertheless interested in old records and we know that he visited the Geelong Police Station and Court House to look for them.

His personal contacts would have been invaluable here, since he had been born in Geelong and had trained as a lawyer, while his father had worked as a Crown Prosecutor in Geelong. Armstrong later made similar inquiries regarding old records of the Clerk of Courts at Sale, a public servant who had previously been the Clerk of Courts in Geelong.

In 1928 a circular was sent out as a Premier’s Instruction requiring all government departments to consult the Library Trustees before destroying official records. Following this instruction, and an inspection of records by Librarian Ernest Pitt, a number of offers were made by several government departments to transfer records to the Library, including six further volumes of convict indents spanning the period 1831–1842 from the Law Department. Today, Public Record Office Victoria holds a total of 30 volumes of these priceless convict indents.

Penal Department records were transferred from Pentridge Prison in September 1933. Records transferred from Pentridge (which ultimately closed in 1997 while under the management of the Department of Justice when Victoria’s first privately-managed prisons came on line) have, unfortunately, not always been in a usable condition. We discovered this recently when a member of the public researching their family history was unable to access the register of specific interest because its pages were still stuck firmly together following water damage sustained in extinguishing a fire at the prison – and to repair the register would have been prohibitively expensive! For many years, historical records of prisoners were held at Pentridge in primitive and unsatisfactory conditions in underground dungeons in the prison’s notorious D division. Thankfully, many of these records have now found a more appropriate home at PROV.

The sometimes less than perfect state of preservation of justice-related public records has a long and often colourful history. In 1857, for example, a Mr Horne, MP declared in parliament that

many of the deeds in the Supreme Court Registry Office were almost entirely destroyed by rats and unless the evil were remedied the functions of the Registry Office would be rendered perfectly useless …

In 1883, Police Magistrate at Alberton, Alfred William Howitt, a member of a noted family of writers, advised the Law Department of his serious concerns regarding the dilapidated state of the court house and the difficulty of storing the records in the following descriptive terms:

… the roof has lost a number of shingles and 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 to store the records and documents.

Thankfully, records staff today generally work in more salubrious surroundings!

More recently, when the records of the abandoned Inglewood Supreme Court were cleared in 1969, termites were found to have eaten through the floor of the courthouse and into a pile of court registers three feet high! A water-colour plan of the goldfields had been used to set the fire in the Magistrate’s office; fortunately, the court had become disused before the Magistrate had needed to put a match to it!

In 1936, the Law Department took independent action to systematise the destruction of unwanted court records, demonstrating an early application of the concept of scheduled destruction, later to become a core records management tool implemented through department-wide disposal schedules, which stood the department in good stead in advance of the looming war.

The severe economic constraints of the Second World War brought with them a whole new set of challenges for the survival of Victoria’s public administration archives. George Brown was appointed to the new position of State Controller of Salvage in 1940, and quickly sought to drastically reduce the number of forms in use, and to dramatically expand the recycling of scrap paper, in response to the urgent wartime need to economise on the consumption of paper. As he boldly declared:

In most Departments there are large stocks of hoarded papers as well as bound volumes of ancient records … [and] it should be possible to make a very substantial clearance in this direction … Austral Waste Products (associated with Australian Paper Manufacturers Ltd) … is prepared to purchase, on the basis of 30 [shillings] per ton, all paper coming forward in this manner.

Austral Waste Products, which might be seen as the archival Whelan the Wrecker of its day, wasted no time (no pun intended!) in implementing Brown’s plans, following approval from state Cabinet, but fortunately for the state’s archives their activity did not go unnoticed by both the media and Gwyn James, a lecturer in history at the University of Melbourne, who discovered that some records from some small courthouses in the Maryborough area had been taken by Austral Waste Products. Acting on this advice, the following historic resolution was passed at a meeting on 17 September 1942 involving Mr James, Professor of History Max Crawford (another key advocate for the proper management of public records in Victoria), a politician – the Hon. WH Edgar, MLC – and three library representatives:

… this meeting asks the Premier to take steps to prevent any further destruction of official documents.

The day after that meeting, Chief Librarian Ernest Pitt wrote to the Secretary of the Law Department requesting that the Maryborough court records be held for inspection before pulping, in accordance with the 1937 re-issue of the 1928 Premier’s Instruction that I referred to earlier which was still in force, and the Secretary acceded to this request.

Another significant event that I would like to highlight was the two-week visit to Melbourne in May 1954 by the eminent American archivist, Dr Theodore Schellenberg, Director of Archival Management at the United States National Archives. His expert lectures had a lasting impact on government department recordkeeping and archival practices. The Law Department’s representative at these sessions – the senior clerk of its correspondence branch, Mr H Blake – took careful notes (which still survive) of Schellenberg’s remarks, and it is evident that these notes were acted upon.

From that time onwards, the Law Department exerted a very positive influence on archival policy. This was best exemplified by the efforts of Secretary Harold Chipman – a close associate of Harry Nunn, who we will be honouring shortly. Chipman played an important role as a founding member of the Public Records Advisory Committee, established in February 1969, which prepared the path towards the Public Records Act of 1973.

I hope I have been able to show the consistent role played by the Law Department, and several of its enlightened secretaries, over many years in championing the need for the proper preservation of public records in Victoria, at a time when not all government departments adhered so enthusiastically to the same progressive philosophy.

Today and tomorrow
As one of our more reflective contemporary musicians, Paul Kelly, sang a few years ago: ‘From little things, big things grow’.

Today, Department of Justice officers and staff of the Public Record Office work in partnership to control the number of records created, to ensure that records of purely temporary significance are separated and discarded as early as possible and essential records safeguarded, and that arrangements are made for the regular transfer of non-current files to PROV.

Tomorrow, the Department of Justice is implementing a leading edge Electronic Document Management (EDM) project, which will align the department with PROV’s world best practice Victorian Electronic Records Strategy (VERS) and once again place the department at the forefront of records management practices in Victorian public administration.

In preparation for the implementation of this major project, records awareness information sessions have been held for Departmental staff in the last few months to:

• provide a brief overview of the EDM Project;
• in relation to recordkeeping concepts, explain the benefits of good recordkeeping and provide participants with a theoretical and practical overview of what recordkeeping is; and
• concerning recordkeeping processes and tools, introduce participants to how they will be doing their recordkeeping in future in the Department of Justice.

While the Department of Justice is now well positioned in the brave new world of electronic archiving, we are proud to acknowledge today the farsighted legacy of the systematic recordkeeping systems which were set in train by Captain William Lonsdale in 1836, reinforced by a comprehensive instruction about file-keeping to government departments in the new colony in 1851, and exemplified in particular by the historic and symbolic action of a bewhiskered public servant of Irish descent, Matthew Byrne, when he duly delivered the first set of records from a government department to the Public Library for safekeeping on 31 July 1903.

The foresight of our forbears is all around us today.

Thank you for your attention, and I look forward to participating in the rest of the symposium.

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