Archives and Societal Provenance (eBook)

Australian Essays

Michael Piggott (Autor)

eBook Download: PDF | EPUB

2012 | 1. Auflage
358 Seiten
Elsevier Science (Verlag)
978-1-78063-378-7 (ISBN)

Infos

Records and archival arrangements in Australia are globally relevant because Australia's indigenous people represent the oldest living culture in the world, and because modern Australia is an ex-colonial society now heavily multicultural in outlook. Archives and Societal Provenance explores this distinctiveness using the theoretical concept of societal provenance as propounded by Canadian archival scholars led by Dr Tom Nesmith. The book's seventeen essays blend new writing and re-workings of earlier work, comprising the fi rst text to apply a societal provenance perspective to a national setting.After a prologue by Professor Michael Moss entitled A prologue to the afterlife, this title consists of four sections. The first considers historical themes in Australian recordkeeping. The second covers some of the institutions which make the Australian archival story distinctive, such as the Australian War Memorial and prime ministerial libraries. The third discusses the formation of archives. The fourth and final part explores debates surrounding archives in Australia. The book concludes by considering the notion of an archival afterlife. - Presents material from a life's career working and thinking about archives and records and their multiple relationships with history, biography, culture and society - The first book to focus specifically on the Australian archival scene - Covers a wide variety of themes, including: the theoretical concept of the records continuum; census records destruction; Prime Ministerial Libraries; and the documentation of war

Textauszug

A prologue to the afterlife

Michael Moss, Professor,     Research Professor in Archival Studies, Humanities Advanced Technology and Information Institute, University of Glasgow

Ex America semper aliquid novi or, Canberra calling are you receiving me?

We would substitute Australia in this Latin tag, which Sir Hilary Jenkinson used in his review of T.R. Schellenberg’s Modern Archives: Principles and Techniques,1 but we on the other side of the world would, I hope, employ it with respect and not heavy irony. In this combination of new writing and a selection from his oeuvre across his working life and into ‘retirement’, which Michael has put together himself rather than leave it to others to do so when he has shuffled off his mortal coil, he returns often to the debate between these two titans who dominated professional practice and literature during his long career as a scholar and archivist, or perhaps it should be the other way round.

When he invited me to open the ‘batting’ apart from the memorable tweet ‘Canberra calling’, like a kookaburra caught in a snare, he gave me no instructions or advice. It seemed impolite to say no or words to that effect. Perhaps others had done so; he assures me they had not. I was his first choice to open against the Aussies. The very act of his contacting me by e-mail emphasises the tractability and potential for interaction that the Internet affords, not just to scholars but to everyone who engages with archives and much else besides. As Alexander Stille reminds us in The Future of the Past, genealogy ranks a close second to pornography as the most popular activity on the Internet.2 The affordance of the Internet, overlooked by many scholars, is the context in which these essays should be read.

It is the task of the writer of prefaces not to ‘bury Caesar, but to praise him’, to parody Marc Antony. I want to go further by exploring how the many balls Michael has hit towards the boundary throughout his career, often by poking fun at the self-image of his countrymen, will not be ‘interred with his bones’. One of Michael’s cris de cour is for more research into archival practice in the context of Australia. I would want to go further. ‘Up here’ we have made a start by looking at the way recordkeeping practice seeped through what has come to be known as the British Empire. It is easy to imagine that from the European discovery of Australia and settlement in other parts of the world there was some kind of grand Kiplingesque imperial project. You only have to read Stephanie Williams’ new book Running the Show, a collection of vignettes of pro-consuls, to realise what a creaky outfit it was until Joseph Chamberlain arrived at the Colonial Office in 1895 and started to bring order out of chaos, which included a degree of autonomy to the so-called white colonies.3 Nevertheless there was a way of doing things, however imperfectly, borrowed largely from the equally chaotic home civil service. For recordkeeping that was the registry system which in a long gestation from about the time of the so-called Tudor revolution in government emerged pretty much fully fledged at the end of the nineteenth century.4

This was wonderfully lampooned by Anthony Trollope, who himself held a senior position in the Post Office, in his novel The Three Clerks. At the core of the registry system was the docket from which the file creakily developed and for which Trollope composed this little ditty:

My heart’s at my office, my heart is always there –

My heart’s at my office, docketing with care;

Docketing the papers, and copying all day,

My heart’s at my office, though I be far away.5

The office in question was the fictitious department of Inland Navigation. When it was abolished as part of the reform of the civil service in 1853 ‘and the dull, dingy rooms were vacant. Ruthless men shovelled off as waste paper all the lock entries of which Charley [Tudor – one of the three clerks] had once been so proud; and the ponderous ledgers, which Mr. Snape [another clerk] had delighted to haul about, were sent away into Cimmerian darkness, and probably to utter destruction.’6 Another of the three clerks, Alaric Tudor, having served a prison sentence for embezzlement, emigrates to Australia no doubt imposing on his adopted country the recordkeeping systems learned in his early career that were so full of promise.

We can speculate from Michael’s essay ‘War, sacred archiving and C.E.W. Bean’, which forms Chapter 8 of this volume, that British registry practice must have impacted on Bean’s work. He would have seen it meticulously implemented in Lloyd George’s wartime Ministry of Munitions and the efforts that were made to preserve its registry so as to write its multi-volume history.7 When he became Prime Minister in 1916 Lloyd George took the practice with him to the Cabinet Office and in the immediate aftermath of the war set up the Treasury O&M department to police its introduction across Whitehall and the colonial possessions.8 Concern about the history of recordkeeping is one I share with Michael, not simply because it is of academic interest, but emphatically because it is the foundations on which democratic societies with their commitment to social justice and the rule of law are built.9 The Treasury O&M department warrants investigation from every corner of the Commonwealth.

We must, however, beware of claiming too much. Michael is right when he cautions in Chapter 12 ‘what archival science lacks is a theory for a sociology of recordkeeping’. Do not ‘ruthless men’ armed with shovels make a greater impact than one or two timid archivists? Here is fertile ground for trans-disciplinary engagement that I have recently explored in ‘Is it a question of trust or why are we afraid to go to Nineveh?’10 I cite this only because by drawing attention to this lacuna, Michael opens the door onto the solipsistic nature of much archival research for which he chides us good humouredly from other perspectives. We will come to these. A ‘sociology of recordkeeping’ must embrace power relationships which we could describe less starkly as governance, something that is lacking in the continuum model for which Michael only gives two less than hearty cheers in Chapter 12.

Let us explore for a moment what this might mean. For Anthony Giddens, on whose structuration theory the continuum model is built, this came about because of the asymmetry in the distribution of resources that inevitably leads to a dialectic of control where those without resources seek to win power or at least influence ‘the circumstances of action of others’.11 It is in these interactions that ‘meaning’ is dynamically created by the process of ‘double hermeneutics’ and by extension records generated. For dialogue to take place within such a dialectic, information systems must be both trusted and trustworthy - ‘With the development of abstract systems, trust in impersonal principles, as well as in anonymous others, becomes indispensable to social existence.’12 Although Michael eschews, I suspect deliberately, such language, he returns repeatedly to the relationship between those who only leave shallow footprints on the face of history and the powerful who bequeath abundant archives. He cites Australians’ innate dislike of self-aggrandisement and an overbearing government that has its roots firmly in the English Civil War.

Like Carl Becker in his famous – and to some infamous – presidential address to the American Historical Association in 1931, Michael champions the notion of ‘everyone their own archivist’ in his penetrating essay on Percy Grainger in Chapter 13.13 He devotes much of his eschatological musings on the afterlife to personal recordkeeping, while ignoring the other balls he has happily hit over the boundary on his journey for us to find in the long grass (Epilogue). This is where, as Alexander Stille reminded us, the Internet and social networking is making such an enormous impact and much of it is happening despite us and despite the academy. To some this is anathema, to others it is more than welcome. The flip side of the dialectic is the way in which those in power construct the image of their lives and deliberately cloak themselves in a mythology that suits their purpose, explored in the wonderfully funny account, tinged with bathos, of Bob Hawke and the lily pond in Chapter 5.

I recently had dinner with someone who had been private secretary to one of Margaret Thatcher’s ministers and I was surprised that they deliberately encouraged the ‘lady’s not for turning’ image so that when they introduced more moderate legislation than expected it was applauded and passed without comment. Such behaviour raises doubts in both my mind and the other Michael’s about claims archivists make about objectivity and the dark art of ‘appraisal’ with little thought for the ‘ruthless men’ and women for that matter (Chapter 11). As Mary Mitford warned us in her delightful...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 22.10.2012
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft
• Themenwelt: Sozialwissenschaften ► Kommunikation / Medien ► Buchhandel / Bibliothekswesen
• Themenwelt: Wirtschaft ► Betriebswirtschaft / Management ► Unternehmensführung / Management
• Themenwelt: Wirtschaft ► Betriebswirtschaft / Management ► Wirtschaftsinformatik
• ISBN-10: 1-78063-378-5 / 1780633785
• ISBN-13: 978-1-78063-378-7 / 9781780633787