Australian Society of Archivists

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Kirsten Thorpe
Indigenous Records: How Far Have We Come in Bringing the History Back Home?
Many records have been created that document the experiences of Indigenous people in Australia. While the majority of these records are written from a non-Indigenous perspective they can be invaluable for Indigenous people in locating information relating to their families and communities. This paper will look at the responses made by record-holding agencies throughout Australia to improve access to records for Indigenous people. It will provide an overview of the resources that have been created to locate records held in government, church and university archives, manuscript libraries and community keeping places that relate to the experiences of Indigenous people in the 20' century.

Marie‑Louise Ayres
Evaluating the Archives: 20th' Century Australian Literature
Twentieth century Australian literary culture is strongly represented in Australia's archival collecting institutions. Several institutions, including the National Library of Australia, the State Library of NSW, the University of New South Wales at the Australian Defence Force Academy Libra7y, and the University of Queensland Library have actively collected the papers of leading and developing writers, literary publishers, journals and other organisations, and these endeavours are supported by smaller holdings at a range of state, public and educational libraries. While holdings in all these areas and in special interest areas such as drama and children's literature are healthy and capable of supporting a wide range of research, some concerns about future collecting in this area remain.

Sigrid McCausland
Voices of Opposition: Documenting Australian Protest Movements
This article looks at the results of efforts to document the experience of Protest movements, in particular the environmental, peace and anti‑nuclear movements in Australia. It lakes the form of a survey across institutions, concentrating on more recent records and looking at the results of collecting from the researcher's point of view. It is also concerned with questions of the comprehensiveness and representativeness of individual collections in public hands.

Don Boadle
Documenting 20th Century Rural and Regional Australia: Archival Acquisition and Collection Development in Regional University Archives and Special Collections
A growing interest during the 1960s and 1970s in collecting private records from rural and regional Australia led to the creation of dedicated archives and libra7Y special collections in regional higher education institutions. Generally dependent on academic patronage, these collections aimed to support research and teaching, though several also have sought to accommodate the needs of community users. The author traces the impacts of these sometimes conflicting expectations on collecting, and suggests that while several of these ostensibly regional collections are particularly strong in holdings of twentieth century records, those holdings more effectively document their immediate localities, or the special subject interests of their sponsors, than the experience of their more dispersed collecting regions. This is a refereed article.

Richard Cashman
Sport Archives in Australia
Interest in sports archives and museums has increased in the past few decades as sports have become more professional; sports history, supporter and heritage groups have emerged; there has been recognition of the value of knowledge transfer; sports officials have come to see the value of archives; and there have been more tertiary archives courses. While many sports archives have been destroyed or damaged by neglect, a number of private collectors have diligently built up fine collections that have become the core of public collections. There is much more work to be done to appraise and list sporting archives which illuminate a whole host of other subjects including military history, social, economic, cultural and political history.'

 

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