AARL

The first in the field: Prime Ministers' Papers in The National Library of Australia

Graeme Powell

Abstract The National Library first acquired papers of a Prime Minister, Sir Edmund Barton, in 1929. In the next fifty years it sought the papers of every Prime Minister, dead or alive. Negotiations were frequently protracted and frustrating, but ultimately the success rate was high: the Library now holds the personal archives of eleven Prime Ministers and smaller collections of another four. Since 1980 it has deferred to the National Archives in collecting further papers of Prime Ministers and has instead placed greater emphasis on making the existing collections better known and encouraging their use by researchers.

In 1934 Kenneth Binns made his first overseas trip since joining the staff of the Commonwealth Parliamentary Library nearly 24 years earlier. With the aid of a grant from the Carnegie Foundation, he visited about 40 libraries in the United States, Canada and Britain. He spent nine days at the Library of Congress, studying it division by division. On his return to Australia he wrote that 'I am more convinced than ever of the wisdom and foresight of our library committee in taking that great national and parliamentary library as its model'.[1] He was particularly impressed by the success of the Library of Congress in acquiring the papers of former American presidents. A few years later he told David Maughan, the son-in-law of Sir Edmund Barton:

When I was in Washington I learned with great interest of the extensive collection of presidents' correspondence and papers, which the Library of Congress is preserving. Their series from Washington onwards is wonderfully complete and it is now an established precedent for the president to hand over the whole of his personal, as well as his official files.[2]

It was to be a long time before the library's holdings of prime ministerial papers could compare with the presidential collections in the Library of Congress.

As early as 1901, Barton had referred to the Library of Congress as a possible model for the new Commonwealth Parliamentary Library. In 1907 Sir Frederick Holder was unequivocal, declaring that the ultimate aim of the Library Committee, which he chaired, was to create 'a great public library on the lines of the world-famed Library of Congress at Washington'. At the time, the Library of Congress had been in existence for just over a century, but the collecting of presidential papers was a relatively recent activity. Throughout the 19th century the papers of presidents were usually retained by their families, who sometimes lent them to biographers. There were exceptions: between 1829 and 1850, papers of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and James Monroe were purchased by the federal government. They were not, however, kept in a library but rather in the Department of State. It was only in 1903 that an executive order directed that these collections were to be transferred to the Library of Congress. In the next ten years the Manuscript Division of the library began to approach the families of most of the presidents and the collections expanded rapidly in size and number. In 1917 for the first time a living president, Theodore Roosevelt, donated some of his papers. Further instalments of Roosevelt Papers followed over the next 40 years, by which time they were the largest collection held in the Library of Congress.

The other model of a great national library was the British Museum. It was even older, having been opened in 1759, but until the twentieth century it showed little interest in the papers of prime ministers. As in America, it was usual for the papers of British political figures to be retained by descendants, often in large country houses. For instance, the papers of Sir Robert Walpole, usually regarded as the first prime minister, were only deposited in a library in 1951, more than two centuries after his death. The British Museum did acquire in 1886-89 papers of the 3rd Duke of Newcastle, one of the great political figures of the mid-18th century. It was the exception until 1911, when the papers of Lord Liverpool were received, followed by those of Sir Robert Peel (1917), Lord Aberdeen (1932), and William Gladstone (1935). By the mid 20th century, other prime ministerial collections had found their way into university libraries or the Public Record Office. However, it remained customary for families to retain ownership for at least a generation or two and a few archives, such as the papers of Lord Salisbury, are still kept in the family home. Harold Wilson became the first prime minister to transfer his own papers, when he deposited them in the Bodleian Library in 1993.

If large and wealthy libraries like the Library of Congress and the British Museum were slow to seek political papers, it is not surprising that the Commonwealth Parliamentary Library, with a staff of only five or six, followed suit. The first librarian, Arthur Wadsworth, was acquainted with ten prime ministers and met them regularly in the library, committee rooms and corridors of parliament house in Melbourne. There is no evidence that he spoke to any of them about their papers. He knew Alfred Deakin particularly well, having been taught by him as a schoolboy, and after Deakin's death Wadsworth was asked to contribute to a book of reminiscences.[3] He failed to take the opportunity of inquiring about the Deakin Papers. His deputy, Kenneth Binns, did draft a letter to Pattie Deakin in 1923 suggesting that her husband's unpublished history of federation might come to 'the National Library'.[4] There was no response and it was not until 1965 that the manuscript was finally lodged in the library.

In 1927 the library moved to Canberra and Binns succeeded Wadsworth as librarian. In the following year the Sydney barrister David Maughan wrote to S M Bruce offering, on behalf of Lady Barton, to present the papers of Edmund Barton relating to the federation movement and the establishment of the commonwealth government.[5] The prime minister accepted the offer and asked Binns to deal with Maughan. The first instalment was received in 1929 and included many letters about federation, and manuscript and printed drafts of the constitution. Maughan was anxious that sensitive material and purely private papers should not come into the public domain and Binns constantly reassured him that papers would be used with discretion and restrictions would be observed. Following Lady Barton's death in 1938, further papers and photographs came to light and letters were also received from Sir Thomas Bavin, who had been Barton's private secretary. In 1940 Laurie Fitzhardinge, who was in charge of the Australian collections in the library, visited Maughan and reported the discovery of more letters from Deakin to Barton and papers about the 'Hopetoun blunder' of December 1900.

By this time staff of the library had a much better understanding of the nature and value of the personal archives of leading politicians. Binns had become familiar with the Barton Papers and he had been shown some of the great presidential collections at the Library of Congress. Fitzhardinge had spent a lot of time working on the papers of Sir Littleton Groom, who had served in several ministries between 1905 and 1925. The papers, which were acquired in 1937, were far more extensive than the Barton Papers and Fitzhardinge could see their value not as artefacts but as primary source material. 'The whole history of the first 25 years of federation is preserved here from the inside, and no future student or historian will be able to ignore the material'.[6] Gradually, Binns, his deputy Harold White, and Fitzhardinge were moving to the view that the papers of prime ministers should be actively sought. In particular, they coveted the papers of the most literary of prime ministers, Alfred Deakin.

As with the acquisition of the Barton Papers, the key figure was a son-in-law. Deakin had three daughters and in 1937 Binns wrote to their husbands, referring to the recent acquisition of the Groom Papers and the need for the papers of all the great figures in the federation movement to be held in one institution. David Rivett and Thomas White responded sympathetically, but Herbert Brookes, who was married to the eldest daughter, was noncommittal. Binns' proposal would be kept in mind when the ultimate destiny of the papers was decided, but 'that time in our judgment has not yet arrived'.[7] A few years later Binns tried again and in 1945 Harold White was able to spend two days inspecting the papers. He found it an extraordinary experience. He could not imagine that any other public man could have left such a variety of papers, extending from his childhood onwards and recording his private thoughts and his public career, as well as his relations with hundreds of figures all round the world. Following the visit, a letter was sent by John Curtin urging Brookes to donate the papers to the nation. Brookes replied that the papers would ultimately come to the library, but he was keen that some manuscripts and a biography should first be published. Years went by before the historian John La Nauze agreed to write a biography and it was not to be completed until 1965.[8]

When Binns retired in 1947, the prime ministerial holdings of the National Library were confined to a few boxes of papers of Edmund Barton. The Deakin Papers were the only other archive that had been sought. In the next 23 years, the situation completely changed. As national librarian, Harold White corresponded and talked with the families of 12 deceased prime ministers, as well as with four living prime ministers. By the time he retired in 1970, the library held the papers of Barton, Deakin, Chris Watson, William Morris Hughes and Sir Earle Page, as well as small groups of papers of Sir George Reid, Andrew Fisher, Sir Joseph Cook and James Scullin. In the pursuit of these collections, White and his lieutenants, Cliff Burmester and Pauline Fanning, were determined, persistent and stubborn.

Negotiations were usually protracted, often extending over decades, but in two instances they were straightforward. In 1952 William Morris Hughes died at the age of 90. Not long before, he had appointed Fitzhardinge, who by then was on the staff of the Australian National University, as his biographer. It was therefore logical for Dame Mary Hughes to present his papers to the library, on condition that Fitzhardinge should have first access to them. He sometimes allowed other scholars to consult them, but the papers did not become entirely available until the biography was completed in 1979. The Hughes Papers were the largest personal archives that the library acquired before 1970, but they were an uneven collection, with relatively little on the first half of his career. In 1955 Hughes' old enemy, Earle Page, offered a large collection of files that had been kept at his property near Grafton. Following his death in 1961, Lady Page presented the remainder of his papers, which covered in considerable detail his 40 years in federal politics. Both men would have strongly disapproved, but their papers sit next to each other in the manuscript collection stacks.

While Hughes and Page had kept many papers, other prime ministers left nothing or very little. The papers of Chris Watson, received in 1955, only occupied a couple of boxes. White spoke to Scullin shortly before his death in 1952 and his widow subsequently handed over a file on the appointment of Isaac Isaacs as governor-general in 1930. However, later inquiries only yielded the information that in his later years Scullin had had no desire to write his memoirs or keep papers that would reveal the divisions within his party and government.[9] Similarly, inquiries about papers of Ben Chifley in Bathurst and elsewhere revealed nothing except a few documents in the possession of his biographer. White wrote to Sir Arthur Fadden on four occasions, but Fadden never revealed whether he had kept papers. Similarly, approaches to Frank Forde over a period of 20 years resulted only in vague promises.

Some negotiations were complicated by the necessity of dealing with siblings or cousins. Several descendants of Sir George Reid, living in Britain and Australia, were approached with limited success. Andrew Fisher had five children and the library had dealings with all of them, over a period of nearly 30 years. Library staff had been shown papers of Fisher as early as 1958, but it took numerous letters, phone calls and meetings before the first consignment was received in 1970. The second instalment came in 1981. While the papers were not particularly extensive, they covered most of Fisher's life. There was material on a few of the initiatives of his ministries, such as the Commonwealth Bank, and correspondence on conscription and other major subjects. It had been a long wait, but patience and persistence had been rewarded.

Biographers often played a central role in the acquisition process. Fitzhardinge helped the library acquire the Hughes Papers. Cecil Edwards encouraged Lord Bruce to place his papers in the library, although ultimately to no avail. The writing of the biography by La Nauze delayed the acquisition of the Deakin Papers, but he was a good friend of the library and a useful intermediary with Ivy Brookes and her sisters. In 1965, a month after his biography was published, the papers were formally presented to the library in the presence of Robert Menzies. Burmester called them 'the most important collection of papers ever to come to the library' and 40 years later it would be hard to point to a finer collection. Moreover, it has led directly to other good acquisitions, such as papers of Catherine Deakin, Herbert and Ivy Brookes, Thomas White, Rohan Rivett and John La Nauze. Far more frustrating were efforts to locate papers of John Curtin. In 1949 the public servant and union leader Lloyd Ross told Harold White of an interesting collection in the possession of Curtin's family in Perth. Letters to the family initially met with no response. Ross was another painstaking biographer and as the years passed the family became critical, claiming that he had most of the surviving papers. They also insisted that very few papers had been taken from Canberra following Curtin's death in 1945. The biography was finally completed in 1977, but most of the Curtin material subsequently found in the papers of Lloyd Ross were copies. Negotiations continued for several more years, but no Curtin papers of any substance were ever discovered.

The separation of the Commonwealth Archives Office from the library in 1961 greatly complicated the acquisition of papers of prime ministers.[10] Personal papers stayed in the manuscript section of the library, but some archivists believed that the political collections should have gone to the archives. Relations between the senior staff of the two institutions were often frosty and they worsened when the Archives Office made it clear that it would be competing for the papers of prime ministers and other leading politicians. White and his successor Allan Fleming were angered when the archives intervened in delicate negotiations, as happened with the Lyons Papers in 1967 and the Curtin Papers in 1972. Fleming, who had previously occupied senior positions in the commonwealth bureaucracy, took a strong interest in prime ministers' papers and argued that the government should recognise the distinction between personal and official papers. In the 1970s the issue became even more fraught when it was suggested that proposed archives legislation would give the Commonwealth Archives a monopoly of political papers and might even force the library to surrender some or all of its political collections.[11]

The 'Archives Office problem', as White called it, came to a head over the Bruce Papers. White had talked to Bruce about his papers as early as 1950, when they met in New York and later in Canberra. In 1963 Bruce confirmed that the papers would come to the library and his biographer, Cecil Edwards, also assured White that the papers would come as a bequest. As it eventuated, Bruce, who died in London in 1967, bequeathed the papers to 'the Commonwealth Parliamentary Library'. This error could easily have been rectified, but the High Commission in London, under directions from the Prime Minister's Department, blithely ignored the will and blocked the transfer of the papers to the National Library. They were instead lodged in the Commonwealth Archives Office. White was dismayed, but chose not to protest. Bruce had told him that in looking through his papers he had found very little original material for the period 1923-29, when he was prime minister.[12] This was not a case of false modesty, as the papers turned out to be surprisingly meagre, except for the later years when he was high commissioner in London.

The library had more luck with Robert Menzies, as this time it was the archives that was to be rebuffed. White had known Menzies for over 30 years and often questioned him about papers, but Menzies claimed to have kept little, apart from his speeches. In one speech he said that,

Every time I see Mr White, the librarian, he looks at me with a gleam in the eye and refrains, just, from saying to me, 'Who will get your papers when you are gone?' and I always disappoint him by saying 'I have none'.[13]

No undertakings had been made by the time White retired. Fleming, who had also known Menzies for a long time, took up the torch and in 1973 Menzies told him that that the papers would be bequeathed to the library.[14] In the next two years he transferred to the library a large instalment from his Melbourne office and another from the Australian Archives. He died in 1978 and in his will he left his remaining papers to the Parliamentary Library. On this occasion, the Parliamentary Library promptly directed that the papers be placed in the National Library. Despite his earlier denials, the papers that Menzies and his secretary had accumulated formed the largest personal archive ever acquired by the library. Apart from some diaries, they did not contain anything like the private writings of Deakin, but they documented Menzies' long political career in great detail, especially from 1949 onwards. In later years his family have added papers and photographs, including some from his younger years.

Earle Page and Menzies transferred some of their papers during their lifetimes, as did Sir John Gorton and Sir William McMahon. McMahon was exceptional, as he offered his papers in early 1973, only a month or two after leaving office. The library accepted the offer instantly and hundreds of boxes were transferred from offices in Sydney and Canberra.[15] They were to be closed for 30 years. As library staff organised and listed the files, they became aware that the papers were different from those of the other prime ministerial collections. Nearly all the collections, from Barton onwards, had contained some official papers, but they were balanced by personal letters, diaries, notebooks, and papers relating to their lives outside government. With McMahon the opposite was the case: there were very few private papers and a preponderance of official papers, including cabinet papers, departmental memoranda and submissions. Most of the papers related to his last four portfolios, covering a mere seven years, and there was virtually nothing on his life before he entered government. In time, the library was to receive more papers documenting his later years as a backbencher. It was a very large collection, but it had severe limitations.

The library has not acquired the papers of any of the prime ministers who succeeded McMahon. The 1983 Archives Act ensured that only the Australian Archives could accept custody of Commonwealth records and the office of a modern prime minister would normally contain large quantities of commonwealth records. White and Fleming had argued for the division of official and private records but, with the growth of the prime minister's private office, it became harder and harder to distinguish the personal papers of a prime minister from those of his staff. Moreover, the collections were becoming very large: the 'papers' of Gough Whitlam and Malcolm Fraser numbered thousands of boxes. The Australian Archives was willing to accept all the papers and it has seemed easier to leave it with the responsibility of documenting the lives of recent prime ministers. In doing so, the library was following the American pattern, where the Library of Congress no longer collects papers of presidents, on account of the various presidential libraries established under the aegis of the National Archives and Records Administration. Like the Library of Congress, the National Library is still willing to accept papers of earlier prime ministers or non-official papers of modern prime ministers. Since 1990 it has received a small but important collection of papers of George Reid and further papers of Deakin, Cook, Menzies and Gorton. In 2003 a grandson of Barton donated further papers, almost 75 years after the first instalment was received by the library.

The National Library holds the principal collections of personal papers of eleven prime ministers and smaller collections of another four. Only the McMahon Papers remain partly closed.[16] Although they vary greatly in size, scope and content, they all attract researchers and they tend to be among the most popular personal archives in the library. A survey of usage for the years 1998-2002 showed that six of the prime ministerial archives were among the 20 most heavily used collections: Menzies (2), Deakin (3), Hughes (5), Fisher (13), Barton (15) and Lyons (19). (John Latham, whose papers were the most popular of all, very nearly became prime minister in 1931.) Political historians are a major user group and they often mould their research around individual prime ministers. They may express disappointment about particular collections, but the best of those collections are quite exceptional in the range of the subjects, events and people that they document.[17]

Prime ministers are often described as primus inter pares and the same could be said of the papers of Australian prime ministers held in the library. At no stage did the library limit its collecting to political records generally or the papers of prime ministers in particular. Instead, it has sought the papers of notable Australians in many walks of life and its collection is a very broad one. Letters of and references to prime ministers can be found in the papers of hundreds of individuals, ranging from governors-generals, judges, generals and diplomats to journalists, economists, historians and poets. The Littleton Groom Papers, the first substantial political archive acquired by the library, contain many letters of Deakin, Cook, Hughes and Bruce. Not surprisingly, prime ministers figure prominently in the papers of numerous other ministers, a fine example being the Latham Papers, which include letters of every prime minister from Deakin to Gorton. A special category are the papers of private secretaries and speech writers, beginning with Thomas Bavin (Barton and Deakin) and extending to Don Rodgers (Chifley), Ainsley Gotto (Gorton) and Don Watson (Keating). Above all, the library has been remarkably successful in acquiring papers of prime ministerial biographers: John Reynolds (Barton), John La Nauze (Deakin), L F Fitzhardinge (Hughes), Cecil Edwards (Bruce), Lloyd Ross (Curtin), L F Crisp (Chifley), Allan Martin (Menzies), Blanche d'Alpuget (Hawke) and John Edwards (Keating). Some of these collections contain original papers of prime ministers and all of them have copies of papers drawn from many public archives and private sources, as well as the biographer's own correspondence and notes and tape recordings of interviews. The Martin Papers are possibly the finest example of an artificial prime ministerial archive, bringing together a huge array of sources on the life of Menzies, all meticulously arranged and indexed.

Occasionally, documents written by prime ministers reach large audiences when they are selected for exhibitions or publications of the library. In 1993, for instance, it published, under the title Dark and Hurrying Days, the diary kept by Menzies in London in 1941. The library has occasionally organised events which publicised the prime ministerial archives. For instance, a seminar on the life of Deakin was held in 1993, followed by one on Menzies in 1994 and a more general one on the art of biography in 2001. In general, however, prime ministers' papers are only read by solitary researchers sitting in the reading rooms of the library. Most Australian researchers live long distances from Canberra and the National Library has tried to make some of the prime ministerial papers more accessible by placing finding-aids on the Web, by microfilming and, more recently, by digitising. In 2000, with the centenary of federation approaching, the library decided to digitise all the Barton Papers. It turned out to be a lengthy and at times frustrating project, with many staff involved in clearing copyright, expanding the descriptions in the Barton finding-aid, designing the navigational tools, and linking the images to the metadata.[18] Although there were only 5500 images, it took nearly two years to complete and at the end some staff were hesitant about embarking on another manuscript digitisation project. Nevertheless, it had been a valuable learning experience and it resulted in a set of principles and techniques that have been applied to the digitisation of other collections of personal papers. In 2002, with strong financial support from the Alfred Deakin Prime Ministerial Library, the National Library began to digitise selected series in the Deakin Papers, mainly relating to federal government and politics. This project proceeded more smoothly and was completed in 2004.

At this stage, it seems unlikely that further prime ministerial collections will be digitised by the library in the near future. Huge copyright and privacy issues arise with the publication on the Web of modern personal papers. Leaving them aside, there is considerable uncertainty about the use that has been or will be made of the online Barton and Deakin papers. They certainly enable remote researchers to check references quickly, but historians who wish to carry out sustained research, reading hundreds or thousands of pages of handwritten or typed documents, will almost always prefer to use the originals. Unlike pictures, maps, music or many publications, collections of political papers lack popular appeal, they can be difficult to read, and their organisation may be complex. Particular documents within collections may be highly suitable for inclusion in online publications, but it is questionable whether substantial funds should be committed to digitising a small number of personal archives in their entirety.

The future role of the National Library in collecting and publishing papers of prime ministers is therefore uncertain. There are now several Australian archives and libraries with a keen interest in such records, including prime ministerial libraries based in universities. From the 1920s to the 1960s, the National Library was on its own. It was only a small institution in that period, without its own building, located in a city that most Australians had never visited. Kenneth Binns, Harold White, Allan Fleming and their colleagues were not always successful in locating papers of former prime ministers, but through their hard work, persistence and negotiating skills they were able to acquire and preserve several fine collections.

Notes

1. Report by Kenneth Binns on his overseas tour 13 December 1934 Library Committee reports NLA
2. Binns to David Maughan 1 February 1939 NLA 203/2/153
3. Arthur Wadsworth to Herbert Brookes Brookes Papers NLA MS 1924/1/4171
4. W A Watt to Pattie Deakin 19 October 1923 NLA CP740 Set 11. The Library Committee first used the term 'Commonwealth National Library' on 11 June 1923 to denote the non-parliamentary activities of the library
5. D M Maughan to S M Bruce 26 May 1928 NLA 203/2/153
6. Report on presentation of Sir Littleton Groom's papers, 24 June 1937 Library Committee reports NLA
7. Herbert Brookes to Binns Brookes Papers NLA MS 1924/1/13631
8. For a more detailed account of the acquisition of the Deakin Papers see G Powell 'Modes of Acquisition: The Growth of the Manuscript Collection of the National Library of Australia' Australian Academic and Research Libraries vol 22 December 1991 pp74-80
9. P Perkins to H L White 10 May 1968 NLA 203/19/189
10. The Commonwealth Archives Office became the Australian Archives in 1974. It was renamed the National Archives of Australia in 1998
11. See S Macintyre 'The Library in the Political Life of the Nation' in P Cochrane ed Remarkable Occurrences: The National Library of Australia's First 100 Years 1901-2001 Canberra National Library of Australia 2001 pp123-44
12. Lord Bruce to White 21 October 1966 NLA 203/2/201
13. Speech by Sir Robert Menzies on the presentation of the Deakin Papers 3 December 1965 Menzies Papers NLA MS 4936/6/231
14. Note by A P Fleming on a visit to Sir Robert Menzies 2 March 1973 NLA 203/13/196. Fleming was also responsible for acquiring the papers of Sir John McEwen, whom he had known and worked with for many years
15. At the insistence of McMahon, a large consignment of his Treasury files were transferred to the Library from the Commonwealth Archives Office in December 1973
16. As over 30 years have elapsed since McMahon left office, his papers are currently being examined by staff of the National Archives to determine which documents need to be closed for a longer period, in accordance with the 1983 Archives Act
17. For a more detailed assessment of the papers of prime ministers see G Powell 'Prime Ministers as Record Keepers: British Models and Australian Practice' in S McKemmish and M Piggott eds The Records Continuum: Ian Maclean and Australian Archives First Fifty Years Melbourne Ancora Press 1994 pp93-109
18. P Waring 'The National Library of Australia Edmund Barton Digitisation Project' Limited Addition no 8 August 2001 pp3-6

Appendix

Graeme Powell (please remove '.nospam' from address), manuscript librarian, National Library of Australia, Parkes Pl, Parkes, ACT 2600.