AARL

From the leaders of our nation: Prime Ministers' Records at the National Archives

Maggie Shapley

Abstract The National Archives of Australia holds the papers of many of Australia's Prime Ministers, including Bruce, Lyons, Curtin, Chifley, Holt, Whitlam, Fraser, Hawke, Keating and Howard. From 2000 it undertook a four-year Prime Ministers' Papers Project to locate the records of all 25 men who have held the position of Prime Minister of Australia. The Australia's Prime Ministers portal website was launched in 2002 and the Archives is also producing a series of guides to the archives of Prime Ministers.

When the 2000-01 Federal Budget was released in May 2000, the Canberra Times Arts reporter Helen Musa wrote:

Perhaps the strangest cultural allocation is the $1.6 million over four years for the National Archives of Australia to make the official papers of former prime ministers more accessible. Communications Minister Richard Alston said this would provide insights into 'personal thoughts of some of the great men in Australian politics'.[1]

For the archives, the allocation was a welcome, rather than strange, addition to our normal operating budget and marked the start of the four-year Prime Ministers' Papers Project to locate, document, and selectively digitise the records of the 25 men who had held the position of prime minister of Australia. The project involved the records of prime ministers wherever those records were held, not just those in the National Archives, and had as its main outputs the Australia's Prime Ministers portal website and a series of guides to the archives of prime ministers.

Purpose

The National Archives has a two-part goal reflecting its positioning as both a national cultural institution and as an agent for good government:

A national archival collection, preserved and accessible for all Australians; the creation and management of commonwealth records that support accountable government.[2]

The first phrase aligns the National Archives with the National Museum, National Library and National Gallery and the other collecting institutions, and the second with institutions such as the Audit Office, the ombudsman and parliamentary committees. Both these roles come together in the objective 'to collect, preserve and make accessible the archives of the leaders of our nation'.[3]

The archives collects the records of the 'leaders of our nation', prime ministers, ministers, governors-general and others closely associated with the Australian government in an official capacity, not just to provide the raw material for future scholarship and research, but also to retain the evidence of the process of accountable government. It acquires these records to ensure the retention of valuable official records in commonwealth custody, and also seeks to collect related private material which may complement the official record. The records of prime ministers and ministers provide another perspective to the official records of cabinet and their departments which are also held by the National Archives.

History

The archives' role in collecting prime ministers' records dates from the 1960s, though it was not until the Archives Act 1983 that there was a legislative basis to do so. The act empowers the archives 'to seek to obtain, and to have custody and management of ... the archival resources of the commonwealth'[4] which include records which relate to 'a person who is, or has at any time been, associated with a commonwealth institution'.[5]

Up until the passage of the Archives Act, the National Library had collected many early prime ministers' papers (Edmund Barton, Alfred Deakin and Billy Hughes are particularly notable) and those of the longest-serving prime minister, Robert Menzies. As a result there was much behind-the-scenes lobbying as the Archives Bill progressed through the committee stages to ensure that these collections would remain with the National Library.

The McMahon records provide an interesting example of the pre-Archives Act situation: in 1970, William McMahon's records as treasurer had been transferred to the archives, and following his defeat as prime minister in 1972, further records were transferred from both Treasury and the Prime Minister's Press Office.[6] Meanwhile, McMahon had decided that his papers as prime minister should reside with the National Library. His discovery that his 'personal' records had been transferred to the archives by the Department of the Treasury and the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet resulted in a string of irate phone calls to Peter Lawler, then secretary of the Department of the Special Minister of State, demanding that the records be sent to the National Library. The Treasury files contained many recent cabinet documents which archives' staff were reluctant to hand over to the library. Held in the archives, these cabinet records would be subject to the 30-year rule whereas as part of McMahon's 'personal' collection in the National Library access conditions would be set by McMahon personally. The situation was only resolved after a meeting between Lawler and Sir John Bunting, Secretary to the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, and the archives transferred the records to the National Library in November 1973.[7]

Since then, all prime ministers and the great majority of their ministers have deposited their official records in the National Archives.[8] Apart from providing the authority for the archives to collect prime ministers' papers, the Archives Act also provided that the collections already held by the National Library should remain there.[9]

However, the National Library was not the only institution collecting prime ministers' records: state libraries had acquired them in their manuscript collections, as had university archives and local history collections. Prime ministers also created records in other capacities before, during and after their term as prime minister, so that records of a prime minister can be found in many archives throughout Australia, from national institutions to state archives to business archives.

The current dispersal of prime ministers' papers is just one of the factors which makes the United States presidential library model unsuited to the Australian environment.[10] While Australian prime ministerial libraries may seek to model their operations on the US example, it should be noted that they do not hold the official papers of prime ministers as, for example in the case of Curtin, Hawke and Whitlam, these are held by the National Archives. Instead the National Archives and the prime ministerial libraries collaborate on the digitisation of records and other projects (including the Australia's Prime Ministers website) to form virtual links between the records held by each institution.

Another factor is the culture of political donation which exists in the United States as presidential libraries are built using private funds, and only pass to the responsibility of the National Archives and Records Administration on completion and on endowment of further funds for their maintenance. The Clinton Library which was recently opened cost US$165 million, and the National Archives spends US$42 million each year to maintain the other presidential libraries. This level of funding is difficult to imagine in the Australian political environment.

Acquiring prime ministers' records

The way in which prime ministers' records were acquired by the National Archives has not always been straightforward. Stanley Melbourne Bruce's papers were bequeathed to the Parliamentary Library in his will, but when Bruce died in 1967 the Parliamentary Library (then and now not in the business of collecting official or private papers) asked the archives to take them into its custody. The records of Sir Joseph Cook (prime minister 1913-14) came to the archives 80 years later in 1993 having been passed down through his family. A small collection of Forde family papers and photographs were bought at auction in 2001. Frank Forde was only prime minister for eight days after Curtin's death, but a long-serving deputy prime minister to both Curtin and Chifley.

Harold Holt's records came to the archives in a series of transfers over many years: the first was in 1959 and consisted of papers from his time as minister assisting the Minister for Supply and Development 1939-41, followed by a number of transfers of official papers from the Prime Minister's Department and other departments he had been associated with, in the years following his death. Further private material was donated by his family under the Cultural Gifts Program in May 2002.

The contents of the briefcase that Holt had taken to Portsea with him in December 1967 have had an interesting provenance since that time: the official papers were kept by his principal private secretary until late 1967, then passed on to Sir John Bunting, Secretary of the Prime Minister's Department where they remained until transferred to the archives in October 1987. The exception was a letter addressed to Holt by the Governor-General Lord Casey, which was returned to the Governor-General's Office after Holt's death and is now in the Casey Papers held by the National Library of Australia. The donation of private papers in 2002 by the Holt family included the briefcase itself and the rest of its contents so now all the contents, except the Casey letter, are together again.

Other prime ministers' records have been received directly from the Department of the Prime Minister and other departments that prime ministers were associated with, but more recently, from Gough Whitlam onwards, the records have come directly from the prime minister's office at parliament house. A recent trend has been the orderly and regular transfer of material on an annual basis rather than as one complete accumulation of material for the prime minister's years in office.

What are prime ministers' records?

In the early days of the commonwealth administration, prime ministers' records might have been defined as those which he created and retained in his office. However, from 1901 to 1904 the prime minister was also the Minister for External Affairs and the early correspondence files of that department deal with matters relevant to both portfolios. A separate prime minister's office is not apparent until 1904 when Chris Watson took the portfolios of prime minister and treasurer, rather than external affairs, and a separate prime minister's office was established. In 1910 the prime minister's office consisted of a Secretary, three clerks, a senior messenger and a typist.[11] It was not until July 1911 that the office became a Department of State.

Today, there is the prime minister's office at Parliament House, staffed by both public servants and private ministerial advisers, and supported by the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, headed by a secretary and with a number of outrider agencies, as well as the prime minister's electorate office. All of these entities create records for the prime minister, and these could all be said to be prime ministers' records.

Records created by prime ministers are also part of other people's and institutions' collections of records. For instance when a prime minister writes to colleagues, friends, acquaintances, premiers, other heads of state and constituents, this original correspondence may be retained in official and private archives. The wives of prime ministers also create records which relate to their performance of the duties of the prime minister on behalf of their spouses. Then there are records about a prime minister, such as photographs and audiovisual records of interviews, press conferences and public events, records of their education and other careers, and records compiled by their political opponents.

The National Archives takes a broad view of prime ministers' records and acquires both official and private records created and maintained by prime ministers and their staff.

The prime ministers' papers project

Given the dispersal of prime ministers' papers, however defined, throughout Australia in national, state, regional and local collections, the 2000-01 Budget allocation of $1.6 million presented the opportunity to map this distribution and through the internet to bring these collections together.

It was not the intention to take into custody prime ministers' records already held in other institutions - a point on which we were keen to assure other collecting institutions. Instead, our approach was to create a 'virtual archives' of prime ministers' papers through the website, wherever the originals were located.

At that time according to an Australian Bureau of Statistics survey 43 per cent of households had access to the internet, while others may have had access through local libraries, educational institutions, and their workplaces. This figure was confirmed by the 2001 Census which found that 37 per cent of households had recently accessed the internet. But while there were more Australians who could not easily access the internet than those who could, making the prime ministers papers more accessible could not rely wholly on an online solution.

More importantly, before we could create a website portal, we needed to identify and locate as many prime ministers' records as possible. While some institutions made their databases available on their websites and we were able to conduct our own online searches, in many cases we needed to visit the institutions to use their onsite databases or indeed, their card indexes and other finding aids. An intensive search was also done of the biographical literature to locate the sources that had been used to produce them.

As a first step we wrote to many of the archival collections which we knew had prime ministers' records in their collections, inviting them to participate in the project. We quickly realised that while a number of institutions were in a position to devote resources to identifying their own material and further were able to create webpages of their own, there were many small archives who would be relying on the National Archives to identify their records on the proposed website.

While we did not limit ourselves to records held in Australia, we recognised that at least some records of an Australian prime minister would presumedly be found in many National Archives around the world (for instance, if an Australian prime minister wrote to congratulate a newly appointed head of state), so we deliberately did not undertake a worldwide search but included any that came to light in bibliographical searches.

We also recognised the need to put our own house in order. Recent transfers of prime ministers' records had taken place in circumstances where there had not been time for full and orderly documentation of the transfer to be produced (for instance, after the government had been defeated at an election) so we needed to ensure that our own holdings were adequately described on our own RecordSearch database. We recognised too that the records of prime ministers' wives were often not clearly identified as theirs.

Apart from documenting our collections of prime ministers' records, we also needed to make connections between those records and the cabinet and departmental records in our custody and undertake targeted searches on our vast photographic collection. Before records could be digitised and used on the website, they had to be cleared for public access. In any case, in promoting records of prime ministers we wanted to make sure that if records were listed on our website or in a guide that they would be immediately available if requested in the reading room (and therefore cleared for public access beforehand).

We also decided that where we highlighted a particular document on the website, we would digitise the whole file so that the context of the document could be seen online, rather than just providing a digitised image of the individual document.

The Australia's Prime Ministers website

The Australia's prime ministers website was launched as was fitting by the current prime minister John Howard in November 2002. It was developed as a portal to link information about prime ministers' records in over 70 institutions in Australia and overseas.[12] The audience was recognised to be as broad as all Australian citizens, in that the website provides information about our system of democratic government and the role that individuals play in such a system. The information on the website might be used by schoolchildren completing their homework, secondary and tertiary students and their teachers, journalists wanting to confirm facts, or researchers in the fields of history, political science and law wanting to access the evidence of government actions and decisions.

With this diverse audience in mind, the website is structured to present basic information upfront such as the 'Fast Facts' and 'Timeline' features. Individual documents are presented within the 'Meet a PM' section, divided into 'Before', 'Elections', 'In office' and 'After', plus one relating to the prime minister's wife. To ensure that the information was correct and up-to-date we engaged a panel of experts consisting of historians, biographers, writers and academics to advise on the content produced by our own in-house experts. For those wanting to undertake more detailed research, the 'Research Map' provides the means to search for material on a particular prime minister, which can also be narrowed by location. An additional feature is a list of theses, articles and books on each prime minister which can also be searched.

Portal partners on the website project produced their own prime ministers webpages to facilitate easy access to their prime ministers' records, including the National Library, ScreenSound, the Australian War Memorial and the John Curtin Prime Ministerial Library, while other collaborators (other prime ministerial libraries, state archives and libraries, university archives and libraries, business archives and school archives) provided lists of their material.

Guides to Archives of Australia's Prime Ministers

In addition to the website, we established a series of printed guides to the records of prime ministers. These are also available online on the National Archives' website for free downloading (or the print version can be ordered) and are updated as new material comes to light.[13]

With 25 prime ministers since Federation, the process of choosing which ones to produce guides for first was based on a number of factors:

• The age of the records - because most official records are not released to the public for 30 years, only those prime ministers who served in the period up to 1970 were initially considered;Covering the period - rather than start at 1901 and proceed through the decades, we tried to select prime ministers from each decade for the initial guides;
• The length of the prime minister's term - four prime ministers had terms measured in days and weeks, so Earle Page, Arthur Fadden, Frank Forde and John McEwen were relegated to the end of the list;
• The quantity of extant records - we knew from initial research that for some early prime ministers, the quantity of extant records would not be sufficient to devote a whole guide to them;[14] and
• Records held by the National Archives - given the expectation of results from a four-year project, we gave preference to prime ministers where the National Archives held the primary collection of records as we could devote resources to documenting those collections in more detail.

As a result, we have so far produced five guides which represent six of the seven decades and ten of the 16 longer-serving prime ministers in the period to 1970. We first commissioned a guide of the earliest prime ministers in the wake of the Centenary of Federation celebrations. Our First Six covers the period 1901-15 and prime ministers Edmund Barton, Alfred Deakin, Chris Watson, George Reid, Andrew Fisher and Joseph Cook. The extant records of some of these prime ministers did not justify a whole guide, and the decision to produce one guide for all six was assisted by the fact that Deakin and Fisher both had three separate terms with short-term prime ministers Watson, Reid and Cook in between their terms.[15]

The other four guides published are for the records of Stanley Melbourne Bruce (1923-29), Joseph Lyons (1932-39), John Curtin (1941-45), jointly published with the John Curtin Prime Ministerial Library, and Harold Holt (1966-67). The next guides to be published will be on Robert Menzies (1939-41, 1949-66) and Gough Whitlam (1972-75) whose 1975 papers will be released on 1 January 2006.

The guides include descriptions of both official and private papers held by the National Archives and other institutions in Australia and overseas. They are structured so that readers can locate material held in particular institutions and material that relates to a particular period of the prime minister's life, eg leader of the opposition, prime minister or high commissioner, followed by a section called 'Death and memorials'. Pictorial material is listed separately in a section 'Portraits and photographs', and records of the prime minister's wife are also included in a separate section.

Further promotion of prime ministers' records

The original Budget allocation has of course all been expended but interest in our past prime ministers continues. In conjunction with the Canberra Times, the National Archives produced an education magazine entitled The Top Job: Who's Who of Australia's Prime Ministers. It was inserted in an issue of that newspaper in June 2004, but was also available for multiple distribution to schools and encourages students to log on to the website. In its first full financial year of operation in 2003-04, the Australia's Prime Ministers website attracted over 260 000 visits.

The archives is currently developing an exhibition drawing on our prime ministers' records. This will be displayed in our Treasures Gallery to complement the permanent display of the constitution and other important documents of federation, as well as the exhibition on the high court.

Every year on 1 January another year of commonwealth records are released to the public under the 30-year rule - a year's worth of cabinet, departmental and prime ministerial records. Each year there are updates to be done on the website as another year of the prime minister's records reach the 30-year mark, and further records can be digitised and made available for public use. And of course the website will expand as new prime ministers are appointed in the future.

Notes

1. 'Arts 2000' Canberra Times 10 May 2000 p30
2. National Archives of Australia, Corporate Plan 2004-06 p1
3. Ibid p9
4. Commonwealth Archives Act section 5(2)(f)
5. Ibid section 3(2)(c)
6. National Archives file 1969/721 Hon William McMahon personal archives
7. The McMahon papers in the National Library are currently being examined by archives' staff before public release
8. The Review of the Archives Act by the Australian Law Reform Commission recommended that the legislation should provide that all commonwealth records in the possession of a minister must be transferred to the custody of the archives not later than when the minister leaves office (Australia's Federal Record: A Review of Archives Act 1983 Report no 85 1998 chapter 11)
9. Section 3(1) definition of 'exempt material'
10. M Shapley 'The Virtual Solution for Prime Ministerial Libraries (Or Why the US Presidential Library Model Won't Work Here)' in Someone Special: Issues in the Development of Person Specific Libraries, Archives and Collections, proceedings of the first national conference presented by the Bob Hawke Prime Ministerial Library 18-20 October 2001 University of South Australia 2003 pp63-68 and M Shapley 'Prime Ministerial Archives: Virtual Solutions to Real Challenges', presentation to the Society of American Archivists 65th Annual Meeting Washington DC 30 August 2001
11. Agency notes for CA 588 Prime Minister's Office RecordSearch database at http://www.naa.gov.au
12. The website is at primeministers.naa.gov.au. For more analysis of its development, see T Wilson and L Coltheart 'Reaching Out Revisited: A Case Study of the Australia's Prime Ministers Website', Archives and Manuscripts vol 32 no 1 May 2004 pp88-105
13. The guides are available as free PDF documents at shop.naa.gov.au
14. For instance, no substantial collection of papers of James Scullin as prime minister from 1929-32 has been located (the National Library have a small collection which mostly postdates his prime ministerial years). While the records of prime ministers' wives are often scarce, not even a photograph of Chris Watson's wife Ada (c1861-1921) has been located to date
15. In the period 1901-15 the prime ministerial terms were in order: Barton, Deakin, Watson, Reid, Deakin, Fisher, Deakin, Fisher, Cook, and Fisher

Maggie Shapley (please remove '.nospam' from address), university archivist and head of the Noel Butlin Archives Centre. Until recently she was director, National Leadership at the National Archives. Address: Australian National University ACT 0900.