AARL

The historian as archival collector: an Australian local study

Don Boadle

Abstract: Neither archivists nor historians have shown much interest in trying to establish a link between the kinds of writing an historian does and the kind of archival records he or she acquires and preserves. This paper presents an Australian study, focussing on the writing of the local historian Keith Swan (1916-1996) and the collections he created for the Wagga Wagga and District Historical Society and for Charles Sturt University.

It was just an ordinary, brown Globite suitcase, the sort every kid used to take to school. Inside the lid, attached with sticky tape, was a label with the name 'R C Evans'. It looked like a furphy. The case probably had been disinterred from someone's shed, along with the vestiges of a boy's Meccano and his 00 rolling stock, or picked up for a song at a local op shop. More interesting were the papers - bundles of brittle quarto flimsies, neatly typed in double spacing, interleaved with holograph notes and correspondence. Evidently sources and early draft chapters for a book, they revealed themselves on closer inspection as a collection of folklore, reminiscences and 'robust little stories' which Mrs A E Atkinson of 'The Ranch', Grong Grong near Narrandera, NSW, had put together in the 1930s. [1] A bit of searching established that Mrs Atkinson was Hilda M Freeman (1885-1937), author of the best-selling memoir An Australian Girl in Germany (1916) and a prolific journalist.

Keith Swan's widow knew nothing of the papers' provenance. She had found them in a cupboard at the back of Keith's study while packing up his oral history recordings. Presumably someone had given Hilda Freeman's papers to him in the expectation they would find their way to the archival collection he had created for the Wagga Wagga and District Historical Society (WW&DHS) or to the Regional Archives (CSURA) he had established at the Wagga Wagga campus of Riverina College of Advanced Education (Charles Sturt University since 1989). Yet he held them back. Perhaps he retained the case and its contents to peruse them at his leisure, then simply forgot about their existence. Or, more probably, judged them of little consequence for his own research and writing. What makes the Freeman papers interesting, from a collection development standpoint, is that they would have been the only deposit of folklore in any quantity, and the only records created by a woman and a writer, in the WW&DHS collection. Swan's neglect of them consequently raises a number of broader issues about the role of the historian as archival collector, the most interesting being whether it is possible to establish a link between the kind of writing an historian does and the kind of archival records he or she acquires and preserves.

This is not a matter that has attracted the attention of either historians or archivists in Australia, although it is generally conceded that academic historians played a crucial role from the 1950s onwards in the acquisition and preservation of local and regional records. [2] John Thompson, for instance, has testified to the importance of two pioneering Victorian historians, Geoffrey Serle and Margaret Kiddle, in acquiring records from western district families for deposit with the State Library. [3] Chris Buckley and John Ryan have pointed to the fruitful collaboration of historians, librarians and archivists in collecting regional records to support research and teaching at the University of New England (UNE). [4] And Lionel Gilbert has offered extensive commentary on the pedagogical objectives of the historians who established the New England Historical Resources Centre at the Armidale College of Advanced Education in 1975. [5] Of all these writers, however, Gilbert is the only one to explore in depth how the needs of academic sponsors influenced acquisition and collection development. For all that, he stops short of trying to establish a link between the local histories written by himself and his colleagues and their collecting interests and activities.

Keith Swan provides a manageable subject for a study of this type. The author of local histories of the City of Wagga Wagga (1970) and the Shire of Tallangata (1987), and the founder of two archival collections (the largest currently comprising some 3,700 linear metres of records from the Riverina and Murray regions), he was a careful personal record keeper who documented the broad principles underlying his collecting activities. His intellectual control over the things he acquired was often deficient, but he appears to have left a more comprehensive body of evidence about his activities than other historians who accumulated local and regional collections in Australian tertiary educational institutions. Since his archival collecting went hand-in-hand with the production of his best known book, A History of Wagga Wagga, and effectively ceased after 1980, analysis of his work as an historian and a collector is confined to that book and related articles in newspapers, periodicals and standard works of reference.

The historian

In a hard-hitting review in 1971, the Adelaide academic Gordon Buxton characterised A History of Wagga Wagga as 'fringe-academic', and charged that there was a 'somewhat embarrassing' amount of 'overlap' with his own book, The Riverina 1861-1891 . [6] There is little to be gained at this distance in debating whether Buxton's charge was fair or reasonable. But there is undoubted utility in inquiring why he branded Swan's book 'fringe-academic'. It is not because it is 'scissors and paste' local history of the type that Geoffrey Blainey criticised so roundly in the mid-1950s: Swan did manage to 'put Wagga Wagga into its regional framework', as Weston Bate conceded in another review, even if he was assisted by the 'fortuitous... prior publication of G L Buxton's important study'. [7] More plausibly it is because Swan's writing hovers uneasily between narrative and analysis, prompting Buxton to comment that his colleague's idea of scholarship amounted to little more than 'petty pinpricking', and Bate to lament Swan's 'many loose ends' and his failure to elaborate a convincing explanatory framework for the development he documents. These deficiencies can be traced to the intersection of an antiquarian mindset with a more orthodox professional historical training: an uneasy conjunction that is not at all surprising given Swan's personal circumstances, but one which requires elucidation when the term 'antiquarian' is being used for the purpose of explanation, rather than for cheap point-scoring.

For Australian academics in the 1950s and 1960s 'antiquarianism' acquired negative connotations as the guardians of professional standards, like the Australian National University's J A La Nauze, set out to differentiate the amateur (usually local) historian from the university trained professional. To its detractors antiquarian history is backward looking, values the past for its own sake, and often is preceded by the collecting of objects and 'documents' - in the sense of 'curious' or 'significant' single items, as opposed to complete records series or the whole record group of an individual or an organisation. To its admirers, and particularly to recent commentators like Bernard Smith, Tom Griffiths and Graeme Davison, antiquarian history at its best is enthusiastic, conscious of the importance of material culture, aware of place, and sensitive to the experience of Aboriginal Australians. [8] Now Swan saw himself as having assimilated this sort of antiquarianism. In later years he would take pride from having '"dirtied [his] boots" along the banks of the Murrumbidgee... trying to locate places Sturt actually trod'. [9]

He would also boldly declare that, while he had been born in Sydney and educated in Armidale, his roots were in the Murray River town of Corowa where his father's family had settled in the 1850s. His father was a schoolteacher, so the family led a peripatetic existence, which must have lent piquancy to his nostalgic tales of the Riverina in earlier days. He was especially fond of relating how, as a 15 or 16 year old youth in the Corowa town band, he had been patted on the head by our first prime minister, Sir Edmund Barton, and advised to restrict his drinking to lemonade. It is difficult to imagine any recent prime minister offering comparable advice! He also recalled a civic visit to Wagga, where he was hosted by the builder Charles Hardy, whose son, (Senator) Charles Hardy Jnr, was to achieve notoriety as the charismatic leader of the Riverina (New State) Movement in the 1930s. [10] Raised amidst such stirring 'pastifying', it is understandable why Keith Swan was steeped in an amateur historical tradition with strongly antiquarian roots.

This antiquarian impulse nevertheless had been tempered through exposure to a more conventional professional historiography, a process set in train when he was demobilised from the RAAF Meteorological Service in 1946, and enrolled in the history honours course at the University of Sydney. Graduating with a respectable II, in 1950, Swan was appointed to a lectureship at the recently established Wagga Wagga Teachers' College. He slipped easily into the local rural community. His first wife, Jean Varcoe, whom he had married in 1940, was the daughter of a Hillston grazier, and many of their social contacts were with the district's landholders. Strongly attracted to country life, Swan realised a longstanding ambition in 1973, when he and his second wife, Vera C Moore, purchased a farm at Mangoplah. Later they acquired a substantial grazing property in good country at Westby near Holbrook.

In a 1973 essay, 'Finding Interest and Significance in the Local Community', Swan explained how the death of his first wife had made him 'restless', with the result that 'he seemed always to be travelling', searching for 'documents and listening to old citizens reminisce':

I collected, conferred, conversed, conversed and considered, always remaining close to the landscape whose history I was investigating... The real bonus from this observation of the landscape upon which events have occurred came when one traversed it with a person who linked both landscape and events. So I was privileged to learn from a man whose grandfather acquired a pastoral run fifty kilometres east of Wagga Wagga in 1859 that a bullock-wagon track of necessity had the hilltops flattened out... From yet another, who took me with a parish map and showed me where his father had placed their home in 1872 on the spot where four family selections of 130 hectares each met, I graphically learned about selection under the Robertson Crown Lands Alienation Act of 1861. [11]

By these means, he concludes, he became 'an integral and intimate part of both [the] society and [the] environment' he was studying. [12] His 'particular interest' was in acquiring written sources, the product of the literate elite. But, as he confesses in an essay on the 'folk museum', he did not neglect evidence of material culture and

soon perceived a new dimension in history when implements and other objects began to arrive [at the museum which the local historical society had established in 1967]. I understood much more about nineteenth century industrial and domestic life, for example, from studying pitsaws, adzes, mortising axes, camp ovens, butter churns and kerosene lamps. [13]

This understanding is not mirrored in A History of Wagga Wagga, which for all its sense of place has little feel for the texture of everyday life and work. [14] The reason for this shortcoming can be found in an article Swan wrote for the Daily Advertiser in 1968. It begins by noting that in the previous week's paper he had said 'he would devote some time to [considering] the evolution of farm machinery in the region'. He had since 'decided to break this sequence because some interesting material has been unearthed'. The 'interesting material' related to the Wagga Wagga branch of the Union Bank, whose manager 'was a prominent civic figure, serving on numerous committees and being for several years - from 1880 to 1883 - an alderman of the borough council'. [15]

Prominent civic figures are very much the province of the antiquarian, preoccupied with those responsible for the beginnings of things. In Swan's account special importance is attached to the self-made emancipist elite, exemplified in persons like Charles Tompson, George Best, Henry Angel, and their (quite numerous) male descendants. They were pre-eminent in pastoral and business affairs until the 1880s, and 'a most significant element in Eastern Riverina Society', as Swan remarks in his 1973 essay. Yet the implications of that assertion are never sufficiently pursued in A History of Wagga Wagga, despite it taking Swan some 160 pages to get to 1891. The 'remaining twenty pages', as Buxton remarked in his review, 'suffice for a superficial skim through the next eighty years'. [16] Swan's concern is with progress measured in terms of institutional creation. So he charts the establishment of churches, hotels, schools and racecourses, the building of roads, bridges and telegraph lines, and the distribution of land through legislation authorising free selection.

The seemingly inexorable march of progress meanwhile is signalled in the headings of chapters three through six - 'The Village Rises "Like a Phoenix"', 'The Town Takes Off', 'Unspectacular Growth', 'The Mighty Place' - and underlined by a consistent reductionism and omission of detail that effectively places the 'phenomenal development of the years 1861-81' at centre stage. He does concede that during 'the years of economic depression in the... early 1930s unemployment hit the town, [and] there was a "tent town" below the Hampden Bridge... but in the long term development was only slightly interrupted'. [17] Readers may be tempted to ask whether the 'tent town' inhabitants were 'only slightly' hungry. But they will get no answer, for Swan rushes on in his next sentence to the proclamation of Wagga Wagga as a city in 1946, then wraps up his book with a chapter which insists 'that even in this very affluent part of the affluent society there is a heart, a soul, a morale! The community... does care.'[18]

This up-beat ending stands in marked contrast to the elegiac tone of most antiquarian local histories, which typically lament that the price of development has been a loss of 'community'. [19] Yet Swan's treatment of that 'community' is very much in the mainstream, with local society depicted as churchgoing but non-sectarian, preoccupied with charitable works, politically conservative, and fundamentally consensual. To sustain this harmonious image requires him to discount the evidence of those like Hilda Freeman and Mary Gilmore, whose concern is with the life and customs of ordinary Australians. [20] Neither Gilmore's Old Days - Old Ways, A Book of Recollections nor her More Recollections finds a place in his bibliography, though they appear to be his source for her claim - which Swan sceptically sets down in his fourth chapter - to have been introduced to Latin and Greek at Mr Pentland's Academy at North Wagga. [21] In part it is her notorious unreliability: her authorial meanderings; her 'possuming' in Miles Franklin's words; her refusal to 'let the truth stand in the way of a good story', as Bill Gammage puts it. [22] But, more crucially, the problem for Swan is their diametrically opposed constituencies.

Whilst her two books appear to adopt the form of the memoir, they are really collections of short stories, as her biographer implies when he draws comparisons with the writing of Henry Lawson and Barbara Baynton. One of her strengths, he writes, is the way she

stresses the general economic privation of life on the land for the poorer families and the particular burden that poverty placed on rural women who went without the small necessities that modern life takes for granted.... Much worse, however, was the emotional deprivation... Mary's bush women are...victims - but they are more like Lawson's than Baynton's; for they suffer, not so much physical violence and terror, as the slow remorseless grind that destroys the spirit long before it kills the body. [23]

Literature of this type presents a particular challenge for historians like Swan, because it embodies not so much folk-history as the values of ordinary people refracted through the ideas and circumstances of the author who created it. [24] Without an understanding of this context - of Gilmore's egalitarianism, her fierce advocacy of the rights of women, and her interest in the fate of minorities like Aborigines - it is impossible to make sense of her testimony. Yet, used with an eye for its author's ideology, her writing can be especially valuable in alerting the historian to questions that need to be asked. One thinks, for example, of her story in 'The Old Proud Woman' about the 'chalk-line' at the Wagga Wagga Gold Cup Ball. Whether a chalk-line was ever drawn, or a rope stretched across between the squatters and the 'increased trade population', which - she assures us - owed its well being to 'the multiplication of selectors', is not important. What is important - and worthy of investigation - is her assertion that 'the division of the classes was as marked as the division between night and day', and her consequential implication that the temper of the locality was decidedly radical. [25]

Certainly the political situation in Wagga Wagga was 'complex', as Gordon Buxton and Sherry Morris admit, but the town 'became an important centre of labour politics', and 'gave birth... to that most fearsome mouthpiece of radicalism in the nineties, the Hummer ' (which numbered Mary Gilmore, née Cameron, among its contributors). [26] Swan, however, rejects Gilmore's implication out of hand. 'There is', he insists, 'strong evidence that radical republicanism was exotic in Wagga Wagga.' As for 'the class structure of town and district', it 'is impossible to generalise... because there were so many cross currents; almost every organization, social or political, drew men from most parts of the political spectrum... Sport was the great leveller.' In religion, the denominations were busy building their churches, and 'had little time to bicker', with the result that there was 'no overt sectarianism'. And though 'factions developed among the leaders of the community, fanned "by the two local thunderers of the press"' - the Wagga Wagga Express and the Wagga Wagga Advertiser - this was merely an aberration, exacerbated by journalistic exuberance, which led to 'a rather amusing horsewhipping incident early in 1874'. [27] By the first years of the 20th century, again according to Swan, local society was 'conservative, complex, but much more mature... It is somewhat surprising, then, that... in 1920, the famous Sister Ligouri case began and made Wagga Wagga... notorious'. [28]

Bridget Partridge, who took the religious name Mary Ligouri when she was professed as a Presentation sister, left the convent at Mount Erin in July and, with assistance from Protestant extremists, made her way to Sydney where the Bishop of Wagga Wagga issued an order for her arrest and detention on the grounds of insanity. Certified sane, she sued the Bishop for wrongful arrest. Ligouri is one of the few women to appear in her own right in Swan's book. She is all the more interesting because she is neither a wife nor a mother, and hails from the working class. Yet, though we are told about her, we never hear her voice or learn anything about her personal circumstances. While her biographer stresses that the Presentation Congregation already had 'failed to persuade her to return to her family in Ireland', Swan becomes defensive as he rebuts Weston Bate's charge that he 'had played down... this somewhat "juicy" affair'. [29] His judgement, he assures us, was not coloured by his being both a 'local' and an elder of the Presbyterian Church:

Doubtless I was influenced by my knowledge of the Defamation Act and by my sympathy for those involved, some of whom I knew. Otherwise, ... I was not affected by my residence in the town, and was prepared to state what I considered were the important details and to apportion blame where I believed it lay. [30]

The collector and the collections

Given his background, interests and connections it is understandable why Swan should have begun his archival collecting in a local historical society setting. It is also understandable why his collecting should have relied heavily on networking among fellow Presbyterians, whether rural like the Davidsons of Lockhart and the Gibsons of Hay, or urban like the Hardys of Wagga Wagga. Members of both the Hardy and the Davidson families had been involved in efforts to establish a Wagga Wagga historical society and gather records from other families in the district. Walter Hardy had made a start in 1946, but the society 'had languished very quickly after its establishment'. Revived by R M Davidson in 1950, it again foundered in 1953, the year of Davidson's death. [31] These events were almost certainly related, because (as Brian Fletcher has noted) much depended on 'the activity of a particular individual or small group'. Without this stimulus 'nothing occurred'. [32] In 1962 the WW&DHS was back in action, this time under the presidency of the indefatigable Swan himself. For some time he had been collecting records to support his teaching and research at the Teachers' College and the Institute of Riverina Studies. Commissioned by the City of Wagga Wagga to write its official history in the late sixties, he used his weekly column in the local newspaper to make known his 'discoveries', and encourage citizens to donate interesting material in their possession to the society's archives. [33]

There is insufficient documentation to do other than conjecture, but it appears that Swan never developed a systematic collection policy for the WW&DHS, relying mainly on his appeals to elicit interesting items. Nor did he adopt orderly accessioning practices, or enter into formal agreements with those who entrusted him with their records. It is consequently impossible to determine the provenance of some items or to date when they were received into the society's collection, and difficult to be certain about whether Swan was responsible for their acquisition. A further complication is that Swan acted as the link between the society and the Riverina College Archives and Records Service (now CSURA), where the WW&DHS collection was deposited in 1977. From time to time he would 'temporarily withdraw' items for 'the society's use'. Until 1982 these transactions were carefully documented, making it possible to track items that were repatriated to their owners. Thereafter, items seem to have been recalled by other society members without any record being made, a practice that continued until 1996. Since then the WW&DHS collection has effectively been a 'closed' collection.

To get a clearer picture of the WW&DHS collection at the time Swan was writing A History of Wagga Wagga, we can undertake collection analysis of the society's holdings of acquired records as they currently stand, compare these holdings with the private records in CSURA's collection, then make further comparisons based on citation and reference analysis of records used in Swan's book. Table 1 presents a distribution of the 60 creating agencies in the WW&DHS collection and, for comparative purposes, the 363 creating agencies held in CSURA's private records collection in December 2000, all arranged according to the agency categories in James Logan's Regional Records On-Line Guide. [34] In making this comparison it is pertinent to note that, although CSURA collects records from the NSW Survey and Planning Regions of Riverina and Murray, 63% of its private records holdings are from creating agencies based in the City of Wagga Wagga. [35]

Table 1

WW&DHS and CSURA: distribution of private records
Creating agencies by agency categories

The most striking feature of the WW&DHS collection is the big quantity of ephemera (which includes photographs), accounting for almost 40% of its creating agencies. The next most numerous creating agencies are in the personal and families category, comprising some 33% of all agencies, which is double the figure for this category at CSURA. There are no female creating agencies in the WW&DHS collection, although there are some items created by women among family records. The distribution for the WW&DHS collection is 30% male and 70% families, whereas at CSURA women comprise 21% of the creating agencies. [36] Some of the district's most socially prominent pastoral families, including the Booths of Gobbagombalin and Tooyal, the Coxs of Livingstone Gully and the Davidsons of Bullenbong, are represented in this category. [37] Considering the importance Swan attached to the emancipist elite, it is surprising to find that there are no records from Charles Tompson, George Best or Henry Angel. Some of the Tompson family are nevertheless represented in the businesses and professions category, where the strongest holdings are from businesses that support pastoralism (such as stock and station agencies). Stations and properties are predictably well represented in both collections. Academics, researchers and writers are totally absent from the WW&DHS collection, and there is a single agency only (scrapbooks from the Wagga Wagga Art Society) in the artistic and cultural category. Still more curious is the total absence from the WW&DHS collection of records from creating agencies in the agricultural, labour, employer and professional organisations category, especially when interest and pressure groups are proportionately better represented in the WW&DHS collection than at CSURA.

Table 2

WW&DHS: distribution of private records
Creating agencies by date of records creation

An antiquarian concern with the beginnings of things can be discerned in the proportionately stronger holdings of 19th century records in the WW&DHS collection. Table 2 reveals that the records of 19% of the society's creating agencies are of exclusively 19th century origin, compared with just 2% of CSURA's (Table 3). The earliest record in the WW&DHS collection is Hugh Mackay's probate, granted in 1835. The rest of the Mackay papers are mainly from the 1880s, whereas the Davidson papers include significant holdings from the period c. 1848 to 1860. For records of 19th and 20th century origin, the figures for WW&DHS and CSURA are more closely matched at 13.5% and 15% respectively. The gap widens, however, in the 20th century. Only 16% of the society's agencies created records after 1949, whereas the comparable figure for CSURA is 40%. If the same exercise is repeated for agencies in the personal and families category of both collections, the records of a quarter of the WW&DHS agencies are of exclusively 19th century origin. The CSURA figure is just short of 11%.

Table 3

CSURA: distribution of private records
Creating agencies by date of records creation

An emphasis on the colonial period, and on pioneering families, is entirely characteristic of the antiquarian. What is puzzling, though, is Swan's neglect of institutional records, particularly when he flags the creation and development of institutions as a critical marker of progress. The key to this puzzle lies in the relative size of different kinds of record groups. Whereas single personal or family record groups in the WW&DHS collection typically amount to less than a dozen items, institutional records are generally voluminous. They require space for storage, and their management presents challenges for those who have no expertise in archival arrangement and description. An additional consideration is that the antiquarian mindset predisposes collectors to search out curious items, on occasion at the cost of allowing the remainder of the record group to become separated or even to be destroyed without proper appraisal.

Reference analysis of private records from the WW&DHS collection listed in the bibliography of A History of Wagga Wagga reveals that Swan was not immune to this temptation. Three of the eight entries are for personal reminiscences by prominent pioneering settlers, R Cox, J Hurst and J B Edney (the latter composed entirely in rhymed couplets). Interestingly, neither the Cox nor the Hurst items remain with the WW&DHS collection. Analysis of some 526 citations in Swan's endnotes meanwhile discloses a relatively low level of citation of all types of sources by contrast with other contemporary practitioners. Only 11% of his citations are to 'archives' in the broadest sense of the term. When printed ephemera and single items of dubious provenance (most of them from the WW&DHS collection) are excluded, the figure drops to around 7%. Tape recorded oral history interviews (none of them presently in the WW&DHS collection) comprise just 2% of citations - a low figure considering his claim in his 1973 essay that the 'very limited time span' of Australian local history 'allows one to use oral and written reminiscences with confidence'. [38] Finally, a handful of local newspapers accounts for some 64% of citations. This level of citation is significantly higher than in the local histories written by Gammage, Bate and Janet McCalman, where newspapers comprise around 40% of all citations. [39]

Critically analysed, newspapers have the potential to tell us much about contemporary social values and attitudes. But Swan reads them not for what they tell him about the customs and beliefs of ordinary people, but as a record of institutional progress and achievement under the guiding hand of powerful individuals and interest groups who took press support for granted as they pressed on with projects aimed at fostering what they saw as regional development. [40] Since he attached such importance to the evidential value of the print media, it comes as no surprise to find that one of his first acquisitions, after he persuaded the newly established Riverina College of Advanced Education (RCAE) to establish a professionally managed regional collection in 1973, was the set of file copies of the Daily Advertiser that hitherto had been kept at the newspaper's Wagga Wagga office.

The trigger for this new round of collecting was not specifically 'archival'. Rather, it was the offer of the big working library of Margaret Carnegie (1910-2002) of Kildrummie, Holbrook - a local historian and celebrated collector of Australian art. This provided the nucleus for what Swan and his librarian spouse, Vera C Swan, described as the 'Riverina Special Collection'. Although the Swans did not hesitate to leave their sizeable collection of objects in the care of the WW&DHS museum, the society's archival collection was progressively transferred to the special collection in the Information Resources Centre at RCAE. Keith Swan meantime declared their interest in acquiring virtually any useable primary sources, including 'books and periodicals relating directly to the region', 'newspapers', 'business archives', 'private papers', 'records of community organizations', 'photocopies of original manuscript material held in other collections', photographs, 'cartographic material' and oral history. [41]

A tour of North American and British collecting institutions from August to December 1977 reinforced the Swans' commitment to this eclectic acquisitions program, more reminiscent of a library-based local studies unit than an archive. They were particularly influenced by three weeks spent in Canada, visiting the Provincial Archives in Toronto and the University of Western Ontario's 'excellent regional collection'. The latter was in the midst of its Landon Project: 'an extensive acquisitions program based principally upon [the] microfilming [of] locally held public and private documents' to create a research resource for 'regional total history'. [42] It is difficult to know precisely what the Swans made of the Landon Project, since one of its objectives was to film records 'reflecting the total complexion of society; ... the papers of the plumber as well as the politician; the menial as well as the musician'. [43] This would then facilitate the production of 'total history': a 'broadened, deepened' community history of the type associated with the French Annales school. Keith Swan's diary entry does not refer to either 'total history' or 'total archives', and gives no sense of the multiple meanings regularly attached to the latter portmanteau term by Canadian archivists. [44] But it does make clear that what he and Vera had seen had 'convinced [them] that [their] own ideas [had] been very much on the right lines'. [45]

While the Landon Project had confirmed the rightness of gathering both public and private records into a single repository, the Swans' visit to Britain's City of Birmingham Library ultimately led them to react against the administrative implications of the local studies model. They were so impressed by Birmingham's local studies department that they made two visits, establishing strong rapport with its head librarian, Doris McCulla. 'She is a great enthusiast,' Keith Swan noted in his diary, 'and put to us the idea that archives should be associated with a library, which is more geared for providing information to the public... I will have to think about what I recommend in my report when I return to Australia.'[46] He had, in fact, already given the issue careful consideration prior to his departure, and had proposed to the RCAE council that it change the name of the Riverina Special Collection to the 'Margaret Carnegie Collection', to reflect the actual composition of Carnegie's library, which primarily was a collection of printed Australiana, with its greatest strength in the colonial period. This was given effect during his absence overseas. [47] But he made no formal recommendation about the future of the archival portion of the Riverina Special Collection until March 1978, when he proposed to the RCAE principal, Dr C D Blake, that a professional archivist, directly accountable to the principal and not to the librarian, should manage the archives as a separate entity. This was partly because the deleterious consequences of subjecting archives to library control systems were only too evident in the Birmingham collection,[48] and partly because 'the development of a separate and independent archival profession' had hastened 'the separation of archives from the administrative control of libraries and librarians' in most of the other institutions he had visited. [49]

Although Blake readily endorsed Swan's proposal that the archives should not only collect private records, but also manage the records of the college and serve as a regional repository for the Archives Office of NSW (now State Records), he did not give his backing to the recommendation about library control of the archival collection. A professional archivist in due course took up duty in February 1979, but the position reported to the librarian and the archives continued to be housed in the library. Swan did not see this actual physical location as disadvantageous since he wanted the archival and Carnegie collections to be complementary, with the division between them on the basis of format. From the outset this division proved difficult to determine and even more complicated to maintain. Swan himself envisaged that the archivist would care for non-current records, pictorial material and oral history, while the librarian would manage printed books, serials, newspapers, ephemera and maps in the Carnegie collection. But he immediately confused the issue by declaring that although 'newspapers, parliamentary papers and other such printed sources are not properly archival... they are frequently deposited in an archives, which is geared for conservation and preservation'. [50]

The consequence of these various decisions was the creation of what can be categorised as a 'combined function regional repository'. [51] That is, an institutional and a collecting archives, which cares for the institution's own records and also acquires public and private records in order to make them available for research purposes. With such a range of functions and a paucity of resources relative to them, collection managers were faced with the task of assigning priorities. Since there was no formal statement of these until after the arrival of Don Brech as archivist in 1979, Swan's collecting continued to be directed to acquiring records that had hitherto been beyond the resources or the remit of the WW&DHS.

He secured several notable accessions of private records, among them the extensive personal and business papers of the Hay grazier, engineer and water resource lobbyist, J Alan Gibson, together with the long-coveted and very voluminous records of the Tubbo Estate Company. But much of his energy went into acquiring newspapers. He made arrangements for microfilming scattered holdings of the Wagga Wagga Express and the Albury Banner, and persuaded selected local newspaper offices throughout the Riverina to supply issues gratis as they were published. He assured the principal that 'an efficient plan must be developed for collecting oral and visual material', but made no progress with it, in spite of having carried out quite a number of oral history interviews himself during the 1960s. Finally, in 1978-79 he turned his attention to locating and securing the transfer of public records, particularly from regional courthouses and lands offices. Some of these already were in Sydney, in Archives Office custody, others remained in the offices of their creators. Writing to the Archives Office's senior archivist, John Cross, Swan frankly confessed how 'delighted' he was about the '"discovery" of material for the years before 1885' among the records of the Crown Land Agent at Albury - a comment that serves to remind us that his antiquarian preoccupation with colonial beginnings remained undiminished. [52]

Conclusion

In the hands of successive professional collection managers, CSURA's holdings of public and private records have acquired an emphatically 20th century character, with 83% of the private records creating agencies in the pre-1949 and post-1950 date ranges (Table 3). The variety of creating agencies represented in the private records collection has also expanded as archivists seek to document more aspects of regional life. By contrast, the WW&DHS archival collection effectively remains a 'closed' collection. In the absence of new consignments from existing creators, or the addition of new creating agencies, it provides a convenient, if incomplete, glimpse of Swan's interests and preoccupations in the late 1960s. Its very considerable holdings of ephemera (some 40% of all creating agencies) testify to the abiding attraction of the local studies collection model, which offered him the convenience of the 'one stop research shop'. The Riverina Special Collection likewise bespoke his readiness to acquire and preserve not only archives, but a variety of sources in a range of formats. Somewhat promiscuously distributed between the Margaret Carnegie Collection and what is now CSURA during Swan's administration, they were segregated after Brech and Vera Swan reached agreement in May 1979. [53] Following Brech's departure in 1982, these arrangements were disrupted by his successor, resulting in disputes between library and archives collection managers right down to the beginning of 1994. [54]

The eclecticism of Swan's collecting, and the haphazard character of his collection management, owes much to the antiquarian tradition. That tradition also suffuses his historical writing. Although he evidently thought of himself as a pioneer in the academic study of local history, he might more accurately be characterised as a transitional figure, fired up with a goodly dose of civic pride, yet uneasily attempting to maintain the canons of professional scholarship. The result was what Buxton has described as 'a useful official history... well above the usual standard', but disappointing because of its inadequate analysis, its insufficiently elaborated explanation of the processes it discerns, and a preoccupation with a period that already had been 'explored in depth elsewhere'. Like all writers of commissioned local histories, Swan was 'careful not to offend', and took care 'to absolve Wagga Wagga residents from the taint of radicalism and republicanism'. Concerned with presenting the city as a consensual and caring society, Swan discounted the evidence of those who offered a contrary viewpoint. By putting aside the ordinary citizens whose voices are so memorably captured in Mary Gilmore's books and Hilda Freeman's manuscripts, he robbed his account of the very richness and texture of everyday life that the best antiquarian work captures. Constrained by this mindset in his writing, he ultimately was constrained by it as well in his collecting.

My thanks to Lyn Gorman, David Levine and Troy Whitford for reading an early version of this paper, and to Graeme Powell for a trenchant critique of the penultimate draft.

Notes

1. The phrase 'robust little stories' is Freeman's own: Hilda M Freeman Papers CSURA RW1980/5
2. P Biskup & D M Goodman Libraries in Australia Wagga Wagga Centre for Information Studies 1995 pp350-54
3. J Thompson 'The Australian Manuscripts Collection in the State Library of Victoria: Its Growth, Development and Future Prospects' La Trobe Library Journal vol 6 no 21 1978 p13
4. C Buckley 'History of the University of New England Archives' Armidale and District Historical Society Journal no 40 1997 pp117-34; J S Ryan 'Early University Responses to the Matter of Collecting and Using Archives in New England' Armidale and District Historical Society Journal no 41 1998 pp7-43
5. L A Gilbert 'Sources and Resources: The Beginnings of an Experiment' Teaching History vol 9 no 2 1975 pp27-30; L A Gilbert The New England Historical Resources Centre: Its Nature, Aims, History and Principal Holdings Tamworth Department of Education North West Region 1976; C Buckley 'Local Studies in New England' Local-Link vol 8 no 1 1996 pp6-7
6. G Buxton Review of Swan's A History of Wagga Wagga in Australian Economic History Review vol 10 no 1 1971 pp74-75
7. W A Bate Review of Swan's A History of Wagga Wagga in Historical Studies vol 15 no 58 1972 pp299-300
8. T Griffiths Hunters and Collectors: The Antiquarian Imagination in Australia Melbourne Cambridge University Press 1996 pp1-6 210-218
9. K Swan and M Carnegie In Step with Sturt Armadale Graphic Books 1979 pviii
10. Ibid p125
11. K Swan 'Finding Interest and Significance in the Local Community' in D Dufty et al Historians at Work Sydney Hicks Smith 1973 pp126-127
12. Ibid p135
13. Swan 'Recreating Community Life: the Folk Museum' in Historians at Work pp161-162
14. Vera Swan has suggested to the present writer that Keith Swan took objects in such quantities lest refusal discourage donors or depositors from lodging the records he was primarily seeking
15. K J S[wan] 'Bank's
16. Business Done in Hotel' Daily Advertiser 5 September 1968 p6
17. Buxton Review of Swan p74
18. K Swan A History of Wagga Wagga Council of the City of Wagga Wagga 1970 p170
19. Ibid pp185-186
20. G Davison 'Local History' in The Oxford Companion to Australian History Melbourne Oxford University Press 1998 p398
21. M Gilmore More Recollections Sydney Angus and Robertson 1935 ppix-x
22. Ibid p121
23. W H Wilde Courage a Grace: A Biography of Dame Mary Gilmore Melbourne Melbourne University Press 1988 p299; B Gammage Narrandera Shire Narrandera Bill Gammage for Narrandera Shire Council 1986 p20
24. Wilde Courage a Grace pp299-300
25. G Davison 'Sydney and the Bush' Historical Studies vol 18 no 71 1978 p192
26. M Gilmore Old Days - Old Ways, A Book of Recollections Sydney Angus and Robertson 1934 pp38-40
27. S Morris Wagga Wagga: A History Council of the City of Wagga Wagga 1999 p111; G Buxton The Riverina 1861-1891 Melbourne Melbourne University Press 1967 p289
28. Swan A History of Wagga Wagga pp123-130 153 164
29. Ibid p166
30. Z Denholm 'Bridget Partridge (1890-1966)' in G Serle (ed) Australian Dictionary of Biography Melbourne Melbourne University Press vol 11 1988 pp151-152; Swan 'Finding Interest and Significance in the Local Community' p133
31. Ibid p135
32. K Swan 'The Establishment of the Riverina Regional Archives and the Rationale Behind Such Establishment' Notes prepared for Margaret Macpherson March 1993 CSURA RW1586
33. B H Fletcher Australian History in New South Wales 1888-1938 Sydney University of New South Wales Press 1993 p55
34. [Swan] 'Don't be Misled' pp16-17
35. http://www.csu.edu.au/research/archives/archives-n34.htm [12/1/03]; CSURA Accessions Register; CSURA Accession List RW5
36. D Boadle 'Documenting 20th Century Rural and Regional Australia: Archival Acquisition and Collection Development in Regional University Archives and Special Collections' Archives and Manuscripts vol 29 no 2 2001 pp64-81 esp Table 3
37. Ibid pp73-74
38. These records provide much of the raw material for his newspaper articles in the Daily Advertiser; for instance, he got three weeks' worth of features out of the Davidsons of Bullenbong in July and August 1968
39. Swan 'Finding Interest and Significance in the Local Community' p127
40. D Boadle 'Do Regional Archives Have a Future?' in Archives at the Centre Proceedings of the Australian Society of Archivists Conference Alice Springs 24-25 May 1996 Canberra ASA 1997 pp122-123 for the methodology employed
41. For a discussion of the multiple functions of local newspapers see Nancy Blacklow Community Voices: The Role and Influence of the Riverina Local Press 1910 to 1960 PhD thesis Charles Sturt University 1999. Her chapter on the role of the press in the campaign for inland diversion of Snowy waters, pp146-175, provides a telling illustration of the relationship between elites and the media on questions of regional development
42. K J Swan 'Some Thoughts on a "Special Riverina Collection" in the Information Resources Centre of the Riverina College of Advanced Education' 18 August 1972 RCAE School of Business and Liberal Studies Dean's Subject Files Miscellaneous 1972-76 CSURA CSU1857/1
43. P Bower 'Archives and the Landon Project' Archivaria no 5 1977-78 pp152-155
44. T Cook 'The Tyranny of the Medium: A Comment on "Total Archives"' Archivaria no 9 1979-80 p141
45. W I Smith '"Total Archives": the Canadian Experience' in Tom Nesmith (ed) Canadian Archival Studies and the Rediscovery of Provenance Metuchen NJ Scarecrow Press 1993 pp133-150
46. K Swan's entry for 21 September 1977 in his 1977 Travel Diary (courtesy of Vera Swan)
47. Swan's entries for 30 November and 2 December 1977
48. RCAE Council Resolution C77/69 4 November 1977
49. U Rayska 'The Archives Section of the Birmingham Reference Library' Archives vol 12 no 54 1975 pp59-67 esp p61
50. K Swan 'Report for the Principal and Council of Riverina College of Advanced Education on Observations made in North America and the United Kingdom, August to December 1977' 3 April 1978 and 'The Development of Archives at Riverina College of Advanced Education' 10 March 1978 RCAE Central Records M79/113 vol 1 CSURA CSU2040
51. Ibid
52. D Boadle 'Australian University Archives and their Prospects' Australian Academic & Research Libraries vol 30 no 3 1999 pp153-170 esp pp160-164 168
53. Letter to D J Cross 7 March 1979 RCAE Archives and Records Service Archives Office of NSW File RCA79/1 CSURA CSU1923/1
54. D Brech's notes 'Margaret Carnegie Collection' 28 May 1979 RCAE Archives and Records Service Margaret Carnegie Collection File RCA79/33 CSURA CSU1923/20
55. Boadle 'Documenting 20th Century Rural and Regional Australia' pp69-70

Don Boadle, director, Charles Sturt University Regional Archives, Locked Bag 588, Wagga Wagga NSW 2678. dboadle@csu.edu.au.nospam (please remove '.nospam' from address).