Prof. Stuart Macintyre
Ernest Scott Professor of History, University of Melbourne

I am grateful for the opportunity to participate in this commemoration of the state archives. I have been assisted in doing so by the opportunity to read a draft of Bill Russell’s history of the Public Record Office as well as by colleagues at the University of Melbourne, Fay Anderson and Cecily Close, who have written on aspects of the career of Max Crawford and the history of the University of Melbourne Archives.

History was taught at the University of Melbourne from very early in its history, and some history was written in it. The teaching of history was undertaken by WE Hearn, among his many other responsibilities, and by Charles Pearson, John Elkington and others. The history curriculum spanned ancient, medieval and modern history, both European and British, and it treated Australia as part of the European expansion and British empire.

Hearn wrote on political economy, constitutional history and the emergence of social institutions in Europe. Pearson, who was a distinguished scholar at Oxford and King’s College, London, did not pursue research in this country. Elkington, who was a local man, told Fink’s royal commission after more than two decades in the chair of history that ‘I have work in hand but I have not committed myself to anything very extensive in book form so far’.

The expectation that a professor of history should be an active researcher as well as a teacher only formed towards the end of the nineteenth century. It came along with the paradigm of scientific research, and it reached Australia via England from the scientific school of history codified by Leopold von Ranke in the mid-nineteenth century. It was Ranke who sought to discredit the earlier forms of philosophical and literary history (as practised, for example, by Hume and Gibbon), where the emphasis was on the teaching of lessons about human nature, public morality, patterns of social development and other lessons of the past. Against such speculation Ranke affirmed the writing of history just as it happened, an activity that required a detached and professional expertise. It was based in universities and supported by archival scholarship.

The doctrine of scientific history was preached in the early years of the twentieth century by GC Henderson, who had studied at Sydney under Arnold Wood and then at Balliol College, Oxford; as professor at Adelaide University Henderson played a formative role in the formation of the state archives of South Australia. At Sydney, Wood himself played an important role in the encouragement of the publication of the Historical Records of New South Wales, and later the Historical Records of Australia; in the acquisition of colonial manuscripts by what became the Mitchell Library; and in the formation of the first state historical society at the turn of the century, which, with the characteristic presumption of the premier state, called itself the Australian Historical Society.

As well as fostering the collection of historical records, both Wood and Henderson conducted research in colonial history and put their students to the same activity. The study of history by undergraduates was changing at this time from the study of textbooks, and the learning of a fixed body of knowledge, to a training in historical interpretation (by reference to printed documents) and technique, which had its culmination in exercises with unpublished primary sources, both official and unofficial.

This was the method that Ernest Scott pioneered at the University of Melbourne, after his appointment to the history chair in 1913, and encouraged among secondary schools (through his control of the state’s public examinations). Scott had taught himself the techniques of historical research while a journalist, and later a Hansard reporter, in research into European exploration of Australia and the early settlement of Victoria.

He was a foundation member of the Victorian Historical Society, and suggested within a year of its establishment that the early official records in various state departments should be preserved, organised and made available to scholars. Bill Russell has related the various approaches made by the Society to members of the state government, which had some limited effect.

Scott’s students were regular users of the Public Library. They used its collections of Blue Books, Hakluyt society volumes and other documentary series for their essays. Scott himself conducted original research (which took him well into the archives in the case of his official history of Australia during the Great War), as did his research students, on aspects of national and state history.

Scott was an advocate of national archives, and in a report to the Commonwealth Parliamentary Library Committee written with Arnold Wood in 1926 he urged the establishment of a record office on the same lines as the Public Record Office in London, a step already taken in other dominions. No more came of this until the Second World War when the Parliamentary Library took on the responsibilities of a national archive.

Meanwhile, in Victoria, the Public Library was assuming some of the responsibilities of a state archive, even if they were loosely exercised and irregularly respected. Bill Russell again relates how the librarian, Pitt, worked with the Australian and New Zealand Association for the Advancement of Science to promote archives, and how Scott’s successor from 1937, Max Crawford, recruited Gwyn James (who had formerly worked for the Institute of Historical Research in London) to help him both establish an academic journal and begin a systematic conspectus of historical sources. They resumed lobbying the state government, with particular urgency since the onset of the Second World War brought a further cull of public records.

Crawford’s plans for the Melbourne School of History came to fruition after the war when the Commonwealth assumed increasing financial responsibility for a greatly expanded university sector with a greatly enhanced research capacity — more staff, provisions for study leave, research grants, better libraries, the PhD qualification and scholarships to support doctoral candidature.

Crawford was able to appoint Manning Clark to (re)introduce the teaching of Australian history — and we should recall that Clark began by assembling two volumes of select documents for the purpose, many of them garnered from printed sources in the Public Library. Clark in turn taught a distinguished cohort of historians, including Geoff Serle, Ian Turner, Weston Bate, Stephen Murray-Smith, Ken Inglis and Geoffrey Blainey, who would conduct major research projects in Victorian and Australian history. The department conducted bibliographical exercises, and in the late 1940s was actively seeking out and gathering material held in country Victoria. Geoffrey Serle’s return from doctoral studies in England in the early 1950s brought renewed momentum to this activity.

By this time the Public Library had appointed its first archivist (Don Baker, a student of Manning), and Crawford had helped persuade the state government to establish the La Trobe Library as part of its commemoration of the centenary of separation from New South Wales. An Archives Section of the Library was created, but there was increasing pressure for its separation (and Bill Russell reminds us that the infant history department of Monash University lobbied in 1963 to this end, as did Frank Strahan of the newly established University of Melbourne Archives).

These archives are worth brief consideration. The establishment of the Archives of Business and Labour History at the ANU was a device whereby Noel Butlin was able to retain business records he assembled in the course of his work on Australian economic history that would otherwise have fallen into the no-man’s land contested between Harold White of the National Library and John Metcalfe of the Mitchell Library.

The University of Melbourne Archives, on the other hand, arose more easily out of the interests of historians such as Geoffrey Blainey, capitalising on the existence in this city of very large mining, banking and trade union collections in Melbourne, and the limited ambit of the State Library’s manuscript collection policy. They have been an important research resource (and always appreciated, in contrast to the effort by philistines at the ANU during the 1990s to disband their collection) yet an under-utilised teaching resource.

When we think that Scott sent his students to work over printed sources, it is remarkable that there is not greater use of the originals by undergraduates as well as postgraduates. PROV, as well as the La Trobe Library and the University of Melbourne Archives, do proselytise among fledgling historians. More could be done. Joint appointments are one way to do it.

The achievement of a fully-fledged public record office, often mooted, took a further decade to achieve. It took longer still for its holdings to be fully accessible to researchers, and we welcome the new repository as well as the finding guides and use of digital technology to improve access. Historians have contributed to this outcome both as trained staff, as advisors and as users. Alan Shaw and Geoffrey Blainey have been especially important.

Historians have also been critics: Bill Russell alludes to the trenchant criticism made by Chris McConville of the publication project, Historical Records of Victoria. My colleague, the late Lloyd Robson, was no less critical of the editorial practices.

We note also the way that the cultural and collecting agencies of the state and the Commonwealth have been subjected to the new style of corporate management adopted by the public sector in the 1980s and 1990s, with an increased emphasis on business plans and performance targets. Along with the turn of universities to research management, with its emphasis on strategic priorities and business partnerships, this threatened to relegate scholarly research to a peripheral function.

It is therefore worth acknowledging that while the Kennett government did some violence to the conventions of responsible government, it also rescued our cultural and collecting institutions from decades of neglect. As a former member of the council of the State Library, I have previously praised his attention to its fortunes, and the same holds for this present facility of Public Record Office Victoria.

It supports a wide range of historical research, including family history, local history, public history and much else. It remains foundational to the practice of the discipline of history, and many academics and postgraduate students make use of its holdings. I think the relationship could be fostered further, but on its hundredth birthday it is appropriate to celebrate the partnership of historians, librarians and archivists that brought it into being.

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