Archives and the Australian Great War centenary: retrospect and prospect

ABSTRACT

Based on a keynote address to the 2018 International Society for First World War Studies conference, the author’s survey of a centenary of archival endeavour comprises four time periods and two themes. It highlights the unique role of the Australian War Memorial and its initial documentation priorities favouring Dr C.E.W. Bean’s official war history, the battlefront and the war dead. A post-centenary open-ended aftermath is also discussed covering processing backlogs, the prospective idea of ‘digital breakthrough’ and the archival implications of ever-widening understandings of the war and its endless aftermaths. The paper ends with an appeal for new voices in researching the documentation of Australia’s Great War experience.

KEYWORDS:

• Australian War Memorial
• Australian archival history
• war archives

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Shafquat Towheed and Edmund King, Reading and the First World War; readers, texts, archives, Palgrave Macmillan, New York, 2015, Introduction, p. 2.

2. Geoff Dyer, The Missing of the Somme, Hamish Hamilton, 1994. My quote is the 2016 paperback by Canongate Books, Edinburgh, p. 137.

3. Analysis of the excesses of Australian commemoration were tracked during 2014–2018 particularly by journalists such as Paul Daley at Guardian Australia and historians such as David Stephens at Honest History (see < http://honesthistory.net.au/wp/category/centenary-watch/ >, accessed 11 July 2019). See also Joan Beaumont, ‘Commemoration in Australia. A memory orgy?’, Australian Journal of Political Science, vol. 50, no. 3, 2015, pp. 536–44.

4. Others usually bracketed with FitzSimons include Roland Perry, Les Carlyon and Jonathan King. On the ‘storian’ approach, see Martin Crotty, ‘The sufferings of so and so; hackneyed perennials of Anzac mythmaking’ [review of Jonathan King’s Palestine Diaries; the Light Horsemen’s Own Story, Battle by Battle, Scribe, 2018], Australian Book Review, March 2018, pp. 56–7.

5. For example Michael Walsh and Andrekos Varnava (eds), Australia and the great war: contemporary and historiographical debates, Melbourne University Publishing, Melbourne, 2016.

6. Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds (eds), What’s wrong with Anzac. The militarisation of Australian history. NewSouth, Sydney, 2010.

7. On the AWRS, see < https://www.awm.gov.au/articles/blog/the-australian-war-records-section >, accessed 12 July 2019.

8. For an overview of the histories, see < https://www.awm.gov.au/collection/C1416531 >, accessed 17 July 2019.

9. For example, over defending Norman Lindsay’s wish to donate to the Library the originals of his war posters. See Andrew and Margaret Osborn, The Commonwealth Parliamentary Library, 1901–27 and the Origins of the National Library of Australia, Department of the Parliamentary Library in association with the National Library of Australia, Canberra, 1989, pp. 126–8.

10. Anne-Marie Condé, ‘Capturing the Records of War. Collecting at the Mitchell Library and the Australian War Memorial’, Australian Historical Studies, no. 125, April 2005, pp. 134–52, esp. 136–42.

11. AJ Sweeting, Review Article of Here is their spirit in Canberra Historical Journal, New Series, no. 29, March 1992, p. 41.

12. Typically, 95% of files were destroyed. See description of the remnant series registered as AWM11-15, AWM18-19, AWM22-24, AWM221, AWM223, AWM256, AWM258 and AWM259. Go to < https://www.naa.gov.au/explore-collection > and follow the link to RecordSearch to do series searches for these series. See also Craig Berelle’s blog, 7 January 2016 available at< https://www.awm.gov.au/articles/blog/highlight-official-records-first-world-war-awm22-australian-imperial-force≥, accessed 11 July 2019.

13. For the quote, see ‘Series Note’ for Commonwealth Record Series B2455 by going to < https://www.naa.gov.au/explore-collection >. Follow the link to RecordSearch to do a series search for the series. See also Paul Dalgleish, ‘Keeping the AIF’s Personnel Records’, in Jean Bou (ed.), The Australian Imperial Force, Oxford University Press, South Melbourne, 2016, pp. 175–91 and Anne-Marie Condé’s article ‘A Societal Provenance Analysis … ’ in this issue, especially towards the end of the section headed ‘“2,308,070 distinct records on charge”: the post-war years’.

14. This was a key decade in the UK too with war records becoming available. Ditto Canada; see Tim Cook’s review article ‘Tools of Memory’, Archivaria, no. 45, Spring, 1998, p. 194.

15. KS Inglis, ‘The Anzac Tradition’, Meanjin Quarterly, vol. 24, no. 1, March 1965, pp. 25–44, reproduced at < https://meanjin.com.au/blog/the-anzac-tradition/ >, accessed 25 June 2019. More generally, see John Lack (ed.), Anzac Remembered. Selected Writings by K.S. Inglis, University of Melbourne, 1998.

16. Christina Twomey, ‘Trauma and the reinvigoration of Anzac’, History Australia, vol. 10, no. 3, December 2013, pp. 85–108.

17. Bill Gammage, ‘The broken years’, Journal of the Australian War Memorial, no. 24, April 1994, p. 34.

18. From the 1960s other libraries such as the State Library of Victoria also sought letters and diaries. See Patsy Adam Smith, ‘All those empty pages’, La Trobe Library Journal, vol. 4, no. 14, October 1974, pp. 25–52 and Shona Dewar, ‘“ … from the bottom of a wardrobe”: collecting World War I personal papers at State Library Victoria’, La Trobe Library Journal, no. 98, September 2016, pp. 152–68.

19. Janette Condon and Elizabeth Brown, ‘A repository of change: the re-development of the Australian War Memorial’s Research Centre’, The Australian Library Journal, vol. 49, no. 1, February 2000, pp. 45–50, and Robyn van Dyk, ‘ANZAC Connections: delivering and connecting real content and data online’, The Australian Library Journal, vol. 64, no. 1, pp. 40–7.

20. See my ‘War, sacred archiving and CEW Bean’ in Archives and Societal Provenance; Australian Essays, Chandos Publishing, Oxford, 2012; ‘The distributed Bean archive’ in Peter Stanley (ed.), Charles Bean. Man, Myth, Legacy, UNSW Press, Sydney, 2017, pp. 77–88; and ‘The Australian War Memorial. Beyond Bean’ in David Stephens and Alison Broinowski (eds), The Honest History Book, NewSouth, Sydney, 2017, pp. 64–76.

21. Available at < https://discoveringanzacs.naa.gov.au/ >, accessed 12 July 2019.

22. Many of these trends, framed within a ‘post-memory’ discourse, are canvassed in Bart Ziino, ‘“A Lasting Gift to His Descendants”: Family Memory and the Great War in Australia’, History & Memory, vol. 22, no. 2, Fall/Winter 2010, pp. 125–46. Relevant feminist historians’ insights include Tanja Luckins’ ‘Collecting women’s memories: the Australian War Memorial, the next of kin and Great War soldiers’ diaries and letters as objects of memory in the 1920s and 1930s’, Women’s History Review, vol. 19, no. 1, 2010, pp. 21–37, and Kate Hunter, ‘More than an Archive of War: Intimacy and Manliness in the Letters of a Great War Soldier to the Woman He Loved, 1915–1919ʹ, Gender & History, vol. 25, no. 2, August 2013, pp. 339–54.

23. An excellent outline of the First World War repatriation files is available at < https://webarchive.nla.gov.au/awa/20190808091439/http://www.naa.gov.au/collection/a-z/repatriation-records.aspx >, accessed 23 January 2020.

24. On Canadian arrangements, see Robert McIntosh, ‘The Great War, Archives, and Modern Memory’, Archivaria, no. 46, Fall 1998, pp. 1–31 and Wes Gustavson, ‘“Fairly Well Known and Need Not be Discussed”: Colonel A. F. Duguid and the Canadian Official History of the First World War’, Canadian Military History, vol. 10, no. 2, Spring 2001, pp. 41–54.

25. Unlike the Australian split of official war records, in Wellington all are at Archives New Zealand, see < https://archives.govt.nz/search-the-archive/researching/research-guides/war/world-war-one-1914-1918 >, as is the National War Art collection, see < http://warart.archives.govt.nz/ >, while soldiers’ and others’, letters and diaries are mostly at the letters and diaries are mostly at the National Library, see < https://natlib.govt.nz/researchers/guides/first-world-war#manuscripts>, accessed 12 July 2019.

26. The UK’s Imperial War Museum is to some degree like the AWM.

27. KS Inglis, Sacred Places. War Memorials in the Australian Landscape, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 2008, p. 316.

28. For related views on the AWM, see Paul Daley, On Patriotism, Melbourne University Press, Carlton, Vic., 2018 and Henry Reynolds, ‘The Fighting Retreat of the Anglo-Australians’, Pearls and Irritations, 16 May 2018, available at < https://johnmenadue.com/henry-reynolds-the-fighting-retreat-of-the-anglo-australians/ >, accessed 16 July 2019.

29. AWM26 Operations files, 1914–18 War: go to < https://www.naa.gov.au/explore-collection > and follow the link to RecordSearch to do a series search for the series. See also Anne-Marie Condé’s discussion of AWM26 in ‘Imagining a collection. Creating Australia’s records of war’, reCollections, Journal of the National Museum of Australia, vol. 2, no. 1, 2007, pp. 25–36, especially pp. 29–30.

30. See Agency Note for CA 467 via the NAA’s RecordSearch catalogue.

31. CEW Bean, Anzac to Amiens, Australian War Memorial, Canberra, 1946 (1983 reprint), p. 529.

32. Anne-Marie Condé, ‘Capturing the Records of War. Collecting at the Mitchell Library and the Australian War Memorial’, Australian Historical Studies, no. 125, April 2005, pp. 134–52, especially pp. 142–4.

33. See < https://www.awm.gov.au/commemoration/speeches/national-press-club-address >, accessed 16 July 2019.

34. See < https://www.aph.gov.au/About_Parliament/Parliamentary_Departments/Parliamentary_Library/pubs/rp/BudgetReview201213/Anzac#_ftn10 >, accessed 11 July 2019.

35. A final splurge of A$100 million from the Australian government delivered the Sir John Monash Centre; see Romain Fathi, ‘Look at me!, Look at me!’ available at < http://honesthistory.net.au/wp/fathi-romain-look-at-me-look-at-me-the-sir-john-monash-centre-at-villers-bretonneux-a-frenchmans-reflection-on-his-visit/ >, accessed 16 July 2019 and the Centre’s website at < https://sjmc.gov.au/ >, accessed 16 July 2019. Examples aside from Project Albany include the State Library of NSW’s ‘Life Interrupted’ focus on diaries and letters, see < https://www2.sl.nsw.gov.au/archive/events/exhibitions/2014/life_interrupted/index.html >, accessed 16 July 2019, and Public Record Office Victoria’s ‘Battle to Farm’ website, see <http://soldiersettlement.prov.vic.gov.au/>, accessed 16 July 2019.

36. Hilary Golder, Documenting a Nation. Australian Archives – The First Fifty Years, AGPS, Canberra, 1994, p. 22 and more generally, Anne-Marie Schwirtlich, ‘The Australian War Memorial and Commonwealth Records, 1942–1952ʹ, in Sue McKemmish and Michael Piggott (eds), The Records Continuum. Ian Maclean and Australian Archives first fifty years, Ancora Press, Melbourne, 1994, pp. 18–32.

37. Towheed and King, Introduction, p. 11. The 7 million referred to letters and parcels; Martha Hanna puts the number of just letters and postcards sent home by British soldiers in 1917 at 1–2 million per day, then references evidence giving lower estimates in her ‘War Letters: Communication between Front and Home Front’, International Encyclopedia of the First World War, 8 October 2014 available at < https://encyclopedia.1914-1918-online.net/article/war_letters_communication_between_front_and_home_front?version=1.0 >, accessed 18 July 2019.

38. Carol Rosenhain, The man who carried the nation’s grief. James Malcolm Lean MBE & the Great War letters. Big Sky Publishing Pty Ltd, Newport, NSW, 2016, p. 392.

39. Meleah Hampton, ‘Bullecourt and Beyond’, available at < https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BFEirFvPK44 >, accessed 11 July 2019.

40. For series in NAA custody including files still to be access cleared, see CRS MP367/1; for examples of files ‘Open with Exceptions’, over 100 years old which if now reviewed would be opened, see CRS B539.

41. Peter Stanley, The crying years. Australia’s Great War, NLA Publishing, Canberra, 2017.

42. Verbal advice about the registries from AWM volunteer Ian Haidon and Official Records curator Stuart Bennington, 11 July 2019; email advice dated 22 July 2019 about the Red Cross files from Private Records curator Kerrie Leach.

43. See < https://webarchive.nla.gov.au/awa/20190328022711/http://naa.gov.au/collection/fact-sheets/fs135.aspx >, accessed 22 January 2020.

44. Shaun Rohrlach kindly provided copies of the relevant papers from the NAA Advisory Council. Thanks also NAA staff Tim Mifsud and Anne McLean for related details. See also Bruce Scates, ‘How war came home: reflections on the digitisation of Australia’s repatriation files’, History Australia, vol. 16, no. 1, pp. 190–209.

45. The sample became known as ‘Project Albany’, the media announcement at < http://www.naa.gov.au/about-us/media/media-releases/2016/23.aspx >, accessed 12 July 2019. Immediate use has produced, for example, a website A Land Fit for Heroes available at < https://soldiersettlement.records.nsw.gov.au/about/ >, accessed 12 July 2019, and publications particularly by Bruce Scates and Melanie Oppenheimer including their The Last Battle: soldier settlement in Australia 1916–1939, Cambridge University Press, Pt. Melbourne, 2016.

46. New studies include Craig Deayton, Battle Scarred: The 47th Battalion in the First World War, Big Sky Publishing, Newport, NSW, 2011 and Jean Bou (ed.), AIF in battle: how the Australian Imperial Force fought, 1914–1918, Melbourne University Publishing, Melbourne, 2016.

47. See Bruce Scates, Return to Gallipoli: Walking the Battlefields of the Great War, Cambridge University Press, Melbourne, 2006 and Emily Gallagher, ‘Digging deep: playing at war in Australia, 1914–1939ʹ, History Australia, vol. 16, no. 1, pp. 169–89.

48. Ernest Scott, Australia During the War, Angus and Robertson Ltd, Sydney, Seventh edition, 1941, Preface, p. xi.

49. Beaumont, p. xvi–xvii.

50. Bruce Scates, Frank Bongiorno, Rebecca Wheatley and Laura James, ‘Such a Great Space of Water between Us’: Anzac Day in Britain, 1916–39, Australian Historical Studies, vol. 45, no. 2, 2014, pp. 220–41 and Nicholas Bromfield, ‘The Genre of Prime Ministerial Anzac Day Addresses, 1973–2016’, Australian Journal of Politics & History, vol. 64, no. 1, March 2018, pp. 81–97. As for studies of the centenary, studies include ‘Reflections on the Centenary of the First World War’, see < http://reflections1418.exeter.ac.uk/team/ >, accessed 17 July 2019 and Helen B. McCartney and David G. Morgan-Owen, ‘Commemorating the centenary of the First World War: national and trans-national perspectives’, War & Society, vol. 36, no. 4, 2017, pp. 235–238, and for an Australian equivalent see the symposium convened by Joan Beaumont reported in Australian Journal of Political Science, vol. 50, no. 3, 2015.

51. Romain Fathi and Bart Ziino, ‘Coming home: Australians’ sorties de guerre after the First World War,’ History Australia, vol. 16, no. 1, 2019, p. 10.

52. Jeff Grey, ‘Bean and official history’ in Peter Stanley (ed.), Charles Bean. Man, Myth, Legacy, UNSW Press, Sydney, 2017, p. 115.

53. Example of diary with bullet hole available at < https://www.awm.gov.au/collection/PR03842/ >, accessed 26 June 2019. Another instance are the lovingly compiled scrapbooks discussed by Kevin Molloy, ‘From Kallista to Mont St Quentin: JG Roberts and the memory of the Great War’, La Trobe Library Journal, no. 98, September 2016, pp. 124–135 and by Peter Stanley, ‘Ten kilos of first world war grief at the Melbourne Museum’, accessible at < https://theconversation.com/ten-kilos-of-first-world-war-grief-at-the-melbourne-museum-30362 ≥, accessed 31 July 2019.

54. See Maryanne Dever’s thought-provoking Editorial ‘Archives and New Modes of Feminist Research’, Australian Feminist Studies, vol. 32, nos. 91–92, 2017, pp. 1–4.

55. See < http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/archives-sector/finding-funding/archives-revealed/about-archives-revealed/ >, accessed 12 July 2019.

56. See for example Alexandra Chassanoff, ‘Historians and the Use of Primary Source Materials in the Digital Age’, The American Archivist, vol. 76, no. 2, Fall/Winter 2013, pp. 458–80.

57. See < https://shireatwar.com/about/ >, accessed 12 July 2019. The Web also enables local and individual memory to link with ‘national memories’, as Joan Beaumont notes in ‘The politics of memory; commemorating the centenary of the First World War’, Australian Journal of Politics Science, vol. 50, no. 3, 2015, p. 530.

58. See < http://transcribe.naa.gov.au/ >, accessed 12 July 2019.

59. See < https://mspgh.unimelb.edu.au/research-groups/centre-for-health-equity/health-humanities-and-social-sciences/diggers-to-veterans-risk,-recovery-and-reslience-in-the-first-aif > accessed 11 July 2019.

60. Ross Coulthart, The Lost Diggers, HarperCollins Publishers, 2012 (paperback, 2016). See also < https://www.tracesmagazine.com.au/2013/07/review-the-lost-diggers-by-ross-coulthart/ >, < http://www.abc.net.au/radio/programs/nightlife/ross-coulthart-and-the-lost-diggers/7707882 >, and <https://www.awm.gov.au/visit/exhibitions/remember-me>, accessed 12 July 2019.

61. Allen and Unwin, 2013, p. 599.

62. Jeff Grey, Series Introduction, in Michael Molkentin, Australia and the War in the Air, Oxford University Press, South Melbourne, 2014, p. iv.

63. On the military administration, works by CD Rowley and SS Mackenzie are the standard texts, and there is renewed interest from, for example, Neil Smith (Australian Blue Jackets in German New Guinea, 2016) and Patricia O’Brien at the ANU – see < http://history.cass.anu.edu.au/news/australian-forces-engaged-their-first-action-world-war-one >, accessed 27 June 2019.

64. On German internees (and the quote), see Gerhard Fischer, The Conversation, 22 April 2015 available at < https://theconversation.com/german-experience-in-australia-during-ww1-damaged-road-to-multiculturalism-38594 >, accessed 12 July 2019.

65. Mark Crookston, ‘Repatriation of First World War archives’, October 2018, available at < https://natlib.govt.nz/blog/posts/atl100-new-collections >, accessed 11 July 2019. Liddle was quite open about his intentions to collect and/or copy; see PH Liddle, ‘Report on Gallipoli research in Australia and New Zealand’, Archives and Manuscripts, vol. 6, no. 1, November 1974, p. 11.

66. Bill Gammage, ‘The Broken Years: Australian Soldiers in the Great War 1914–18ʹ in Ann Curthoys and Ann McGrath (eds), Writing Histories. Imagination and Narration, Monash University ePress, 2009, ch. 2, p. 02.4 and Peter Cochrane, ‘“Diamonds of the Dustheap”; Diaries from the First World War’, Humanities Australia, no. 6, 2015, p. 32.

67. Philpott quote available at < https://encyclopedia.1914-1918-online.net/article/warfare_1914-1918 >, accessed 12 July 2019, Scates quote see ‘How war came home’, p. 191. We should also note the related concept of ‘discourse technology’ to explain processes and forms to manage pensions administration. See Angela Smith, Discourses surrounding British widows of the First World War, Bloomsbury, London, 2014.

68. Anne-Marie Condé, ‘Charles Bean and the making of the National Archives of Australia’, Inside Story, 3 December 2017 available at < https://insidestory.org.au/authors/anne-marie-conde/ >, accessed 12 July 2019. A longer version of her article appears in Charles Bean Man, Myth, Legacy, pp. 62–76. I thank her for many helpful comments on this paper and decades of collegial support and shared interest in archives history.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Michael Piggott

Michael Piggott , AM is a semi-retired freelance archivist and researcher, currently Chair of the Territory Records Advisory Council, and most recently a Senior Research Fellow at Deakin University, 2018–19. He was at the Australian War Memorial between 1978–88 and first published in this journal 49 years ago.