Each of the speakers at this symposium has light to throw on the birth of Public Record Office Victoria. In representing the Royal Historical Society of Victoria (RHSV), I think I can claim for the Society a kind of IVF or, better, asexual fatherhood, because it was a gleam in the eye of the founders of this Society – although, as you will hear, they did not exactly know it at the time.

The public movement towards a public record office began when WJ Hughston wrote to The Argus on 20 March 1909 asking for support to form a league to collect the reminiscences of early colonists. In America, strangely, he had met a student researching Australian land legislation who urged him to get old people to talk and write about their experiences so that flesh could be put onto the bones of the past.

Alfred Greig offered Hughston clerical help in his endeavour. He seems to have been just a pen-pushing clerk. Son of the superintendent of the immigrants’ home on the site of Victoria Barracks, he was aged 36 in 1909. In 1913, he joined the registrar’s staff at Melbourne University, became Chief Clerk in 1920 and Registrar from 1937 to 1939. He was to be secretary of the Historical Society from 1909 to 1923, President for three years and a councillor from 1909 until he died. He was focused and energetic about history, a catalyst in its support.

WJ Hughston

AW Grieg

Greig organised a blind date with Hughston, significantly under the portico of the Public Library (not under the Flinders Street Station clocks or at Young and Jackson’s). He was armed with ideas garnered from EA Petherick, with whom the pair met later that day, 7 April 1909, at the Exhibition Building.

EA Petherick (1847–1917), FRGS, seems to have been Greig’s inspiration. Petherick had a vast collection of books, charts and other documents relating to Australasia. He had run a wholesale book-selling business in Melbourne, Sydney and Adelaide, which wound up in 1893.

In 1909, Petherick gave his collection to the Commonwealth Government. Housed at the Exhibition Building, it became the basis of the National Library of Australia’s collection. In the same year, he was appointed archivist to the federal Parliament. Petherick’s bibliography of Australasia, a pacesetting work, was incomplete when he died in 1917. Parts of it were published in the Victorian Historical Magazine in 1911 and 1912.

The three inaugurators, just mentioned, brought the Historical Society of Victoria into being at Furlong’s Studio in Royal Arcade on 21 May 1909. They had gathered impressive support from a veritable galaxy of society and intellect. The Speaker of the Legislative Assembly from 1904 to 1917 presided. He became Sir Frank Madden in 1911, and his elder brother John, already knighted, was made patron.

Sir John, Chief Justice, Lieutenant Governor and Chancellor of the University of Melbourne, had been administrator, politician, barrister and judge. Eloquent and public spirited, he loved sport and country life. An impressive figure, possessing a fine voice, he was warmly hospitable and universally popular.

Despite his prominence, Sir John Madden shone no brighter than the Society’s three vice-presidents: Alfred Deakin, Henry Gyles Turner and WA Watt. Deakin, soon to become Prime Minister of Australia, was a political and intellectual giant whose affability and social conscience need no comment from me.

EA Petherick

F Madden

Turner had managed the Commercial Bank in its 1880s health and 1890s sickness. After retirement in 1901, he published a two-volume history of Victoria in 1904, The First Decade of the Australian Commonwealth in 1911, and a little book on Eureka in 1913. A young immigrant (with his parents, in 1854), he had loved history and literature from boyhood and was one of the founders of The Melbourne Review in 1875. A renaissance type, he was excited by Melbourne life in the 1880s. Tall and muscular, he founded the Banks Rowing Club and was an inveterate bush walker, theatregoer and amateur actor. As he had a great interest in the colonial pioneers and indigenous people, the early sections of his Victorian history are the best.

WA Watt was a talented, forceful, eloquent protégé of Alfred Deakin. He was Victorian Treasurer from 1909 to 1914 and Premier as well from 1912, before transferring to the Commonwealth Parliament, where he became Treasurer in 1918.

Also prominent on council was William Harrison Moore, Professor of Law, who chaired the Historical Society from 1912 to 1915. A celebrated student, WK Hancook, found magic in his lecturers on constitutional history, and the Victorian Government often sought his constitutional advice. A small, fine-boned man, he was bright and boyish although correct and very English in his manner.

This galaxy of society – many were members of the Melbourne Club – were clearly participants in most aspects of the city’s life. As they commanded respect, they gave the Society’s cause tremendous amplification.

To the links with the University through its Chancellor and Professor of Law, add the fact that Hughston persuaded Jessie Webb, a graduate of 1902, to allow the Historical Society to meet in her rooms in Block Arcade. Under Professor Elkington, who had little interest in research, documentary study or Australian topics, Jessie Webb, from 1908, was the sole assistant lecturer in history. But that was to change.

Ernest Scott, who succeeded Elkington in 1913, had already researched and written Terre Napoléon (1910) and Laperouse (1912). He was passionate about working with Australian primary sources and, like HG Turner, was busy at the coal face and in total sympathy with Greig’s principal aim for the Society – to collect and preserve the reminiscences of old colonists and information about Victoria’s early history. Trained as a journalist, and achieving a legendary facility with shorthand as a Hansard reporter, Scott was fascinated by history. Not your usual academic, he was strongly built, bluff and open, sincere and kind. A vivid lecturer and inspiring teacher, he carried a generation of students into a new emphasis on documentary study.

Chairman of the Historical Society from 1916 to 1920, Scott added great force to the agitation about preserving public records because he was a potential prime user, surrounded by enthusiasts. Eight of the eleven articles in the inaugural issue of the Society’s Victorian Historical Magazine of 1911, using local documents, were by council members including Scott, Turner and Petherick.

J Webb

E Scott

On 21 April 1910, the Society carried a resolution, moved by Scott, to put pressure on the Victorian Government to get early public records sifted, arranged, bound in volumes and preserved after the manner of the London Records Office. Led by Greig, a sub-committee of five, including Scott and Petherick, met Premier John Murray in August 1910. A friend of WA Watt, who was soon to succeed him, the Premier promised that there would be no wanton destruction of public records and later authorised the sub-committee to inspect the vaults in which central records were stored. He seems not to have taken up their request for a record office and staff. Neither did Watt later.

The second issue of the Victorian Historical Magazine, May 1912, contained the report of the sub-committee including interviews with public servants about the wanton destruction of records. It defined history, Bill Russell notes, as ‘corporate memory’ and provided the first survey of what public records existed.

In the same issue, Greig published the text of a lecture he had given on early Gippsland, in which was included the first use of a public record by the Society. Interestingly, it came from Alberton and was the first accession into the Historical Society of Victoria collection; just as the first accession of public records into the Public Library in 1903 had been ten volumes of convict indents from the same place.

Although war limited the government’s response, Greig kept at it using the strong links between the Society, the University of Melbourne and the Public Library. In February 1915, he went with professors Moore and Scott to discuss the idea of a record office with the Society’s Vice-President, HG Turner, who was chairman of the Library Trustees. In 1916 they took up the issue at a meeting with all the trustees.

At this time, incidentally, the Royal Commission on the State Public Service suggested economies by throwing out useless old records. It derided the Historical Society’s concern and probably contributed to a disastrous loss of Mines Department records.

In 1918 Greig attempted a pre-emptive strike by asking the Public Librarian, E La Touche Armstrong, to secure the early correspondence of La Trobe, Lonsdale and Hoddle if only into storage, as an important step towards the formation of a state record office. Like a dog at a bone, Greig, with his chairman, Scott, approached the Chief Secretary in November 1919, to ask that the La Trobe and Lonsdale material, together with duplicate despatches, should be made easily accessible as the nucleus of a state records office. It was contended, naturally from Scott’s perspective, that this would provide for a growing emphasis on the study of Australian history. Sir Frank Madden had earlier suggested that a records office be built on the triangle of vacant land between Parliament House and Albert Street, with which the Public Library, according to HG Turner, was happy to be involved. But nothing came of it.

In May 1929 the historical movement went public. A Victorian historical gallery was opened in the Library with an exhibition of items from the collections of the Library, Historical Society and private citizens. Later in the year there was a follow-up, open on Sunday afternoons, that inspired gifts of valuable historical objects. Similarly, the McAllan Gallery was opened in 1931 with a joint historical exhibition that became permanent at least until 1934 when Charles Daley, secretary of the Historical Society, told the Premier that in those three years he had organised over 100 historical lectures on Saturday afternoon in conjunction with the exhibition. Even when Collingwood was playing Carlton?

A decade later there was a powerful new player wearing the history jumper. The University of Melbourne history department, under Max Crawford, used a Commonwealth Government research grant to publish Victorian Historical Documents to save researchers time locating relevant material. He had already been responsible for saving truck loads of public records from wartime waste paper recycling and even tipping, and was to be a driving force in establishing the La Trobe Library in order to house the Public Library’s great but scattered collection of Australiana in the 1950s. By then the influence of the Historical Society was waning. The earlier galaxy had disappeared. I remember an excursion by the Society to Brighton in about 1950 when I was in the midst of research for my MA. They might have appeared from the pages of Charles Dickens’s Pickwick Papers as they peered at gravestones in St Andrew’s churchyard and argued with each other about details of the lives of those below. They were eccentric and antiquarian but marvelously animated by their brand of corporate memory. I couldn’t see them as agitators, except with teaspoons.

Sources:
Russell, EW, ‘The Victorian Archives to 1973’, MS in possession of the author, Melbourne, 2003

Victorian Historical Magazine, vols I, II, X

Australian Dictionary of Biography, passim

Serle, Percival, Dictionary of Australian Biography

Back to index of papers