Australian Society of Archivists
1999 Conference

Bringing them Home - a Queensland perspective

Kathy Frankland

(The opinions expressed in this paper are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the Queensland Government)

In April 1998 the Queensland government issued its formal response to Bringing Them Home - the report of the national inquiry into the separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children from their families. The Government's responses to the recommendations which related to records were mainly covered by reporting that Community and Personal Histories⁽¹⁾ was fulfilling these recommendations.

What I would like to speak about today is the reality of how far the Government and in particular Community and Personal Histories have come in terms of meeting the requirements of these recommendations.

Recommendation 21 relates to the need to ensure that no records relating to Indigenous peoples and in particular records relating to the removal of children are destroyed. All records of this nature held by the Department of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Policy and Development are considered permanent records. In 1996 the Queensland State government put in place an across-government strategy to ensure that no public records which could be of use for research of Native Title Claims were destroyed. A records retention schedule was developed to ensure that these records would be retained and identified for future use.

In relation to recommendation 22a&b, the Queensland government continues to provide funding to Community and Personal Histories which has responsibility for preserving and making accessible the records of Department of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Policy and Development and its predecessor agencies.

Unfortunately, since the inquiry no additional funding for staff has been provided to either assist with reducing the backlog of requests or indexing the records. The waiting period to receive information has increased from eight months to eleven months since the inquiry. Priority is given to requests for information for native title purposes and any requests, for example, where proof of age or Aboriginality is required.

Due to the demands for information from Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples for family history information, Community and Personal Histories staff are almost entirely dedicated to answering these requests leaving little time to index the records. We rely on part-time administrative staff and volunteers to index those records created by the Department of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Policy and Development and its predecessor agencies. The indexing of records relating to Indigenous people and communities created by other government agencies is at the moment beyond the means of our unit and we rely on volunteers like Paul Mackett who has produced over 140 volumes of indexes to mainly Queensland Government records relating to Indigenous peoples.

As Community and Personal Histories only has responsibilities for its own department's records, this has a number of ramifications for clients wishing to access restricted records from other government agencies.

Most clients are keen to find information quickly. Without the government having a "one-stop shop" approach to handle these inquires, clients often have to contact a number of departments to find all the records pertinent to their research. This inturn means encountering different procedures for accessing records held on restricted access. At present the access policy used by Community and Personal Histories is not utilised by other departments. In many departments researchers have to apply for information through Freedom of Information which can be costly and clients sometimes have to wait more than a year to receive their information.

There is also no across Government commitment to indexing records relating to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. Finding information from another department, particularly historical information, at the moment largely relies on whether those records have been indexed by someone like Paul Mackett.

In relation to finding aids, Community and Personal Histories’ Records Guides volume one and two are soon to go up on the Department's home page. The problem we have found with publishing the guides is how quickly they are out of date and it is intended that the versions which are on the department's home page will be live versions which will be constantly updated. Access to records has also been greatly enhanced by the release of Qld State Archives holdings on CD-Rom.

The impact of the Inquiry in terms of the number of requests received from those indigenous people who were themselves taken away has been minimal. While the number of requests being received each year has risen steadily and on average we receive around 600 per year, the majority of these requests come from people who know a reasonable amount about their family background. Most clients would know at least one and usually all of their grandparents' names. However, they may not know where their grandparents came from and it is extremely common for a client to have a parent or grandparent who was part of the "stolen generation". Many clients know for example, that their family has lived for generations on Cherbourg but they are unclear as to where the original family was from before they were removed. It is these clients that we have the most success with helping.

The families which are difficult to trace are those who were either exempt very early on from the Act that is before about 1920 and those families who were never came under the Act. For these families we have to rely on information which may come from birth, death and marriage certificates.

One initiative currently underway which will help us find information includes the development of a removal database. Community and Personal Histories in partnership with Griffith University won a SPIRT grant to sponsor a PhD student who will over the next three years create a database to document the removal of Indigenous peoples in Queensland. The goal is to record all documented removals in Queensland. While our current indexes already hold a considerable amount of information relating to removals, no systematic retrieval of this type of information has ever been undertaken. The way Community and Personal Histories’ staff currently retrieves indexed information is by using a full-text retrieval software. While this means of retrieving information has its advantages, the creation of a database will allow for more complex searching and the retrieval of statistical information.

The area in which little progress has been made in light of the recommendation is in relation to the establishment of a records task force within the state. Unlike other states, Queensland has no formal group dedicated to the tasks outlined in recommendation 23. An informal referral network has existed for some years between Community and Personal Histories and a number of other agencies both intra and inter state including Link-Up, the Indigenous resource unit at the John Oxley Library, and the Queensland Museum, the AIATSIS, Mitchell Library and the Moree Library.

Community and Personal Histories also occasionally receives microfiche copies of records from the Presbyterian Church which are indexed by the unit's volunteers. An agreement was made with the church that we could disseminate this information in accordance with our internal access policy. Often these records from the church record vital information that cannot be found anywhere else. Many of the early marriages between Aboriginal people recorded by the churches were never registered with a local district registrar and thus do not appear on the registrar general's indexes to marriages.

To better support the Churches make their own records accessible, Community and Personal Histories has encouraged the churches to apply for a Community and Personal Histories’ grant. A number of the churches have been successful in winning grants to promote their record holdings and document their history with the Indigenous community. For example the Assemblies of God church as just won a grant to publish a book which has been written on the histories of the Daintree and Gorge Missions.

In regards to recommendation 23, which relates to the training of Indigenous archivists, genealogists, historical researchers and counsellors, the Department of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Policy and Development has recently agreed to support Loris Williams who is a resource officer with Community and Personal Histories to undertake the Graduate Diploma of Science, Archives & Records at Edith Cowan University.

In conclusion, I believe that the areas in which progress is still to be made in light of the recommendations outlined by the Inquiry, includes the establishment of a records task force; improving referral services to counselling agencies which at the moment is fairly informal; developing more detailed in-house guidelines for dealing with the dissemination of sensitive and distressing information to clients, inparticular in relation to traditional Torres Strait Islander adoptions; and the need to respond more quickly to client requests for information.

(1) Community and Personal Histories was established in 1992 and is responsible for making accessible records relating to Indigenous peoples created by the Department of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Policy and Development and its predecessor agencies. Eleven staff are employed in the unit, the majority of whom are Indigenous. Two professional archivists are also employed.