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VICTORIAN HISTORICAL JOURNAL Volume 84, Number 1 June 2013 Articles Introduction...................................................................Judith Smart 3 On Indexing the Argus.......................................................John Hirst xx David Syme’s Role in the Rise of the Age..........Elizabeth Morrison xx The Second Generation: Geoffrey Syme, Managing Editor of the Age, 1908–42............................Sybil Nolan xx W.L. Baillieu and the Growth of the Herald & Weekly Times, 1889–1931.........................................................................Peter Yule xx Promotion of ‘Useful Knowledge’: The Argus and Science in 1850s Colonial Victoria....Amanda Lourie xx The Argus and Miss Sutherland......................................Sharron Lane xx Historical Note The Bendigo Advertiser: Historical Notes...............Carol Holsworth xx Celebrating Fifty Years of Local History in Victoria Introduction: Fifty Years Since ‘Brighton’..................Andrew Lemon xx Fifty Years On..................................................................Weston Bate xx Fifty Years of Victorian Local History......................Graeme Davison xx Panel: The Shock of the 1960s—The Influence of Professor Weston Bate on the Writing of Local History ................... xxx Reviews An Eye for Eternity: The Life of Manning Clark. By Mark McKenna. ........................... ..................(Marian Quartly) xxx University Unlimited: The Monash Story. By Graeme Davison and Kate Murphy...............(Stuart Macintyre) xxx Wolfgang Sievers. By Helen Ennis. ........................(Graeme Davison) xxx Australia’s Controversial Matron: Gwen Burbidge and Nursing Reform. By Judith Godden.............(Madonna Grehan) xxx Victorian Community History Awards.............................................. xxx Notes on Contributors....................................................................... xxx Royal Historical Society of Victoria................................................. xxx Guidelines for Contributors to the Victorian Historical Journal...... xxx 3 4 Victorian Historical Journal Vol. 84, No. 1, June 2013 Judith Smart — Introduction 5 ON INDEXING THE ARGUS John Hirst Abstract This article is based on a lecture given to the Royal Historical Society of Victoria in August 2012. It describes a project, headed by the author and now 30 years old, to bridge ‘the gap’ of 50 years in the indexes to the Melbourne newspaper, the Argus. It also argues the advantages of the resulting indexes over the search facility provided by the National Library of Australia’s website, Trove. FIRST HEARD THE TERM ‘The Argus Index Gap’ in 1983. I was attending a meeting of the History and Heritage Committee of the I organisation charged with honouring Victoria’s sesquicentenary. I left the meeting with the responsibility of filling this gap. Doing useful and lasting things was the mantra of the celebrations. The Argus newspaper was published in Melbourne from 1846 until 1957. There are indexes to the paper from 1846 to 1859, the work of J.A. Feely, a former state librarian. The Argus itself published indexes from 1910 to 1949. In between is ‘The Argus Index Gap’. ‘Yawning Chasm’ might be the better term. There are fourteen years done by Feely; the Argus itself did 40 years. The gap—1860 to 1909—is 50 years! Still, the existing indexes made the Argus the best-indexed metropolitan newspaper in the country. Australian researchers do not have the advantage of those in the United Kingdom and the United States who can go to continuous indexes of The Times and the New York Times. When I explained this lack to a scientific colleague, he said no other money should be spent 6 John Hirst — On Indexing the Argus 7 on Australian history research until such a basic resource as the Argus was indexed. Sadly, this is not how history research is run. The amount of money that came through the History and Heritage Committee was enough only to get started. For a time we had substantial grants from the Australian Research Council (ARC) but unaccountably they ceased. Since then, we have survived on small grants from a wide range of sources. When I run my eye down the grants given by the ARC to individual research projects, I say to myself: ‘for that money I could give you indexes to ten years of the Argus’, which in most cases would be a better way to spend the money. So the work has been done on a shoestring budget. Nevertheless, we have now completed the indexes for the 1860s, 1870s and 1880s. Nearly all the budget has gone to pay the chief indexer, who almost from the start has been Geraldine Suter. Her work has been outstanding; she won the Australian Indexers’ Prize for our first volume, the index for the year 1860. The work of reading and recording the contents of the paper has been done by volunteers. Their labours have been co-ordinated and checked by Diana Phoenix, volunteer in chief. The Argus was chosen for this index project not simply because there were already some indexes to it; the Argus was also the major newspaper of record in Melbourne. The radical liberal paper, the Age, is better known but it was smaller. The Argus was conservative—or, as it would say of itself, constitutionalist—but the politics of the paper did not substantially affect its news reporting. Papers of record no longer exist. Let me describe them by contrast to the so-called quality press of today. If a premier was launching an election campaign, the Argus would report his speech in full—not simply the highlights or the surprises or the differences from previous positions but the full thing. An editorial might deal with it, but there was no other commentary. A paper of record gave a complete coverage in another sense. It recorded the whole life of the town; it recorded events, even if they were only routine. What news editor today would include this report? The adjourned annual meeting of the Melbourne Philharmonic Society was held last evening in the Mechanics Institute Hall, Mr Sumner in the chair. The minutes of the annual meeting having been read and confirmed, Mr Rutter brought up the report of the special committee appointed at the former meet- ing to revise the rules and constitution of the society, and the rules were gone 8 Victorian Historical Journal Vol. 84, No. 1, June 2013 through seriatim, the great majority of them being merely verbally amended. In others a few alterations of no general interest were made. The meeting then adjourned at a late hour, till Tuesday next, when the elections of officers will take place. The attendance of members was numerous.1 We might speculate on the calming and reassuring effect of such reports on newspaper readers. For historians, the benefit is obvious; there is a continuous reporting of the activities of all the institutions in the city. So the affairs of the University Council, the Hospital Board, the Port Authority, the Acclimatisation Society, the Royal Society and more are diligently chronicled. A lecture such as the one on which this article is based, a presentation to a historical society, would certainly have been recorded. Crime sold then as now and was a staple of the papers, but not only violent, salacious and horrifying crime, the good English murders, as Orwell called them. Routine crime was also reported. If your house was robbed, you had the satisfaction of seeing it reported in the newspaper. Every case before the courts was reported, starting with the drunks and disorderlies, which would be listed by name with no other details. We decided not to include these in the index; our test was a report of four or five lines or more. That includes crimes that were trifling enough: a man steals a bottle of wine from a pub. Our index is not a list of references under headings. There are headings but the entries appearing under them have a brief description of what the relevant articles in the paper cover. So, if you look under ‘Rabbits’ in 1885, you will find successive entries reading: ‘simultaneous rabbit destruction in Victoria to begin today’/‘efforts of Samuel Avery, Belfast council rabbit inspector’/‘poison pollutes rivers in Wyndham shire’/‘successful use of poison at Kerang’. These four entries are among the 180 entries under the heading ‘Rabbits’ for that year—all of course with references to the date the articles appeared in the paper, the page number and the column. In these entries, as in others, mini-stories jump out: ‘unemployed sent from Melbourne to destroy rabbits in Wimmera’/‘unemployed arrive in Dimboola’/‘unemployed complain of rates for rabbit destruction’/‘unemployed depart Dimboola for city’. I hope the benefit of such a detailed index will be immediately apparent. However, increasingly we are told that there is no longer a need for an index because the paper can now be read on-line on the National Library of Australia’s Trove website and searched by word. You could search ‘rabbits’ by word, certainly, and generate thousands of hits and go down John Hirst — On Indexing the Argus 9 many burrows. Or you could read our entry and see immediately what was going to be useful. ‘Railways’ in the 1880s occurs more times than ‘rabbits’. If you wanted to follow that most important matter of public policy by a word search, you might begin to classify the railway entries by area: Gippsland railways; railways to the north-east; railways to the Western District and so on. Then you might categorise by subjects that relate to railways as a whole: tariffs; Sunday trains; accidents; administration; excursion tickets and so on. Our index has done all that for you. The first sorting on any major subject has already been completed. If you do not trust our sorting, you can search our index by word. The places that railways served still have the same names, more or less, as when they were built. Nearly all the electorates for state politics have changed their names and none has the same boundaries. If you wanted to study a 19th-century election, you would take a long time to get your bearings.

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