Provenance 2007
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Provenance 2007 Issue 6, 2007 ISSN: 1832-2522 Index About Provenance 2 Editorial 4 Refereed articles 6 Sarah Mirams ‘Tired little Australian Children are still plodding unnecessary miles in wet or shine’: School and Scandal in Mallacoota 7 Valerie Lovejoy The Things That Unite: Inquests into Chinese Deaths on the Bendigo Goldfields 1854-65 17 Keir Reeves and Benjamin Mountford Court records and cultural landscapes: Rethinking the Chinese gold seekers in central Victoria 30 Lee-Ann Monk ‘Made enquiries, can elicit no history of injury’: Researching the History of Institutional Abuse in the Archives 42 Forum articles 51 Noni Dowling Love Is Murder: The fated affair of Frederick Jordan and Minnie Hicks 52 Alain Hosking Very Serious Doubts: The Case of Hassett and De Le Veilless 61 Abigail Belfrage A Stroll Along the Merri: Evoking a landscape through archival research 68 Peter Andrew Barrett Her Majesty’s Collingwood Stockade: A Snapshot of Gold Rush Victoria 76 Cate Elkner Putting Colonial Victoria on the Map: The 1862 Land Act and its ‘big map’ 81 Sonia Jennings Landing A Vote: The past importance of land ownership as an electoral qualification in Victoria 86 Dr Janice Croggon Merely Corroborative Detail: The use of public records at the Sovereign Hill Museums Association, Ballarat 91 ‘Lyn Payne The Township is a Rising One’: The growth of the town of Loch and its school 98 1 About Provenance The journal of Public Record Office Victoria Provenance is a free journal published online by Editorial Board Public Record Office Victoria. The journal features peer- reviewed articles, as well as other written contributions, The editorial board includes representatives of: that contain research drawing on records in the state • Public Record Office Victoria access services; archives holdings. • the peak bodies of PROV’s major user and stakeholder Provenance is available online at www.prov.vic.gov.au groups; The purpose of Provenance is to foster access to PROV’s • and the archives, records and information archival holdings and broaden its relevance to the wider management professions. Victorian community. An editor is appointed to the board to co-ordinate The records held by PROV contain a wealth of production of the journal and the activities of the information regarding Victorian people, places, editorial board. All board members are appointed to communities, events, policies, institutions, the board by the PROV Director and Keeper of Public infrastructure, governance, and law. Provenance Records for a period of two years. provides a forum for scholarly publication drawing on the full diversity of these records. Assessment of submitted articles Assessment of all submitted articles is overseen by Contact the Editor the editor in consultation with the editorial board. All Please direct any queries, comments and submissions articles intended for the peer-reviewed section of the regarding Provenance to the editor, who can be journal undergo double-blind peer review by at least contacted by email at [email protected] two referees with expertise relevant to the submitted or by telephone on (03) 9348 5600, or post to: article. The editorial board also makes recommendations regarding the publication of informal articles in The Editor, Provenance the Forum Section. For guidelines and information Public Record Office Victoria for authors interested in submitting an article to PO Box 2100 Provenance, see the Author Guidelines. North Melbourne Victoria 3051 Australia Available at www.prov.vic.gov.au/explore-collection/ provenance-journal/author-guidelines Provenance journal publishes peer-reviewed articles, as well as other written contributions, that contain research drawing on records in PROV’s holdings. Open access policy Provenance is an Open Access journal which means that all content is freely available without charge to the user or his/her institution. Users are allowed to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of the articles, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without asking prior permission from the publisher or the author. This is in accordance with the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI) definition of Open Access. 2 Archiving of journal Provenance is archived regularly in PANDORA, Australia’s Web Archive, which is a growing collection of Australian online publications, established initially by the National Library of Australia in 1996, and now built in collaboration with nine other Australian libraries and cultural collecting organisations. The name, PANDORA, is an acronym that encapsulates the web archive’s mission: Preserving and Accessing Networked Documentary Resources of Australia. Since 2015, the journal has been aggregated and indexed as full text on the Informit Humanities and Social Science database. Copyright The authors who contribute to Provenance must clear any copyright for material and images in their articles before their articles are published. It is the responsibility of the author to supply copies of images or other material that will be published in the article. Copyright in each article remains with the author of the relevant article. Authors have the right to publish their articles elsewhere subject to acknowledgment of prior publication in Provenance. Users of the Provenance website may have rights to reproduce material from this site under provisions of the Commonwealth of Australia’s Copyright Act 1968. In addition to any such rights, unless there is a statement to the contrary, the author of each article has given permission for physical or electronic copies of the text and graphics in that article to be made for classroom or research use, provided: • Copies are distributed at or below cost; • The author and Provenance are attributed on each copy; • Notice of relevant copyright ownership is attached to each copy; and • The Editor, Provenance, is notified of the use within one calendar month of use. 3 Editorial Provenance 2007 Welcome to issue 6 of Provenance! Before I introduce the Keir Reeves and Benjamin Mountford also explore current issue of the journal, I would like to tell you about the history of Victoria’s Chinese in their article about a prize awarded to last year’s issue (September 2006). the traces Chinese miners have left in the landscape At the recent Australian Society of Archivists Conference of central Victoria. They focus on Vaughan Springs, a in Alice Springs, Provenance was announced as the locality on the Loddon River in the central Victorian winner of the 2006 Mander Jones Award in category goldfields. Through their careful reading of legal and 2: Best publication that uses, features or interprets police records, contemporary newspaper and mining Australian archives, written by or on behalf of a corporate wardens’ reports and the relic mining landscape body. I would like to congratulate and thank all of those itself, they seek to reconstruct a more accurate involved with last year’s issue of the journal, particularly understanding of the complex communities on the the members of the Editorial Board: Lesle Berry, Diane Victorian gold diggings and the experience of Chinese Gardiner, Shauna Hicks, James McKinnon, AGL Shaw, working and living in this area. Awareness about how Katherine Sheedy, Bruce Smith and Lynette Russell. public records can be used to discover information about the transient Chinese goldrush populations was I can happily report that the journal continues to grow, raised in recent years by the very successful PROV and this year we have doubled the number of articles exhibition Forgotten Faces: Chinese and the Law, which since 2006. The range of themes and subjects covered in continues to tour around Victoria. this year’s twelve articles is diverse, as is their approach to researching PROV records, although the predominant The fourth peer-reviewed article transports us to theme this year is Victorian places: government the early twentieth century frontier community of institutions, heritage sites and relic landscapes. Mallacoota. Located in far east Gippsland near the NSW border, the residents of this community found Four peer-reviewed articles in this year’s issue also themselves relatively isolated from the rest of Victoria. provide some interesting insights into the way that Sarah Mirams explores this community’s quest for a records can be interrogated to yield information that permanent school and the way in which records of exceeds the strictly administrative intention for which correspondence between community leader, poet and they were created. In her methodological study, Lee- journalist EJ Brady and Education Department officials Ann Monk has undertaken a careful reading of the can now tell us about the social and political life of available records to report on what they can tell us this remote community at the start of the twentieth about patient abuse. Monk’s analysis is as interesting century. for its interpretation of the gaps and silences in the record as it is about what has actually been documented The first article in this year’s Forum section continues in the treatment of patients at Kew Asylum in the late the education theme by looking at the establishment nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Valerie Lovejoy, of the Gippsland town of Loch in the 1880s and its on the other hand, has continued the exploration of first primary school. Told by Lyn Payne, the story of the history of Victoria’s Chinese immigrants that has Loch’s beginnings reflect similar challenges as those emerged in recent years through research into public encountered by the people of Mallacoota in convincing records. Lovejoy has researched inquest records relating a distant bureaucracy to provide their children with to Chinese people on the goldfields to learn about their permanent and adequate educational facilities. The communities through the testimony presented by the records of the Education Department are also used to peers of those who had died. Originally intended as create a portrait of life in a remote town.