International Archives Day - 9 June Archives: Governance, Memory and Heritage VIC Branch Newsletter Report by VIC Branch Committee MAY 2018 25 MAY 2018 THIS ISSUE CONTAINS: • Notice of ASA VIC Branch seminar • Archives: Governance, Memory and Heritage - Richard Foy, Archives New Zealand • Archives: Governance, Memory and Heritage - Dr Valerie Johnson, The National Archives • Canadian refections on Archives: Governance, Memory and Heritage - Andrew Horrall, Library and Archives Canada • Capturing and sharing Victoria’s memory through the archives - Justine Heazlewood, PROV • ALGA - collecting, preserving and animating our very queer histories - Angela Bailey, ALGA • Finding delights in a 19th Century Inwards Correspondence Collection - Vivien Newton, Bendigo Regional Archives Centre • New grad chat with Suzy Goss • University Archives Special Interest Group seminar - Kim Burrell, Victoria University • 2018 Sir Rupert Hamer Records Management Awards • Call for Papers - Provenance: online journal Cropped image: Identity portrait of Wong Jim from Alien Re-entry records, 1915 / Photographer: Unknown / Source: Archives New • Upcoming events Zealand NOTICE OF ASA VIC BRANCH SEMINAR MAY 2018 ARCHIVES AND IMPERIALISM Date Tuesday 29 May 2018 Time Drinks and nibbles 6 - 6:30pm, Seminar 6:30 - 7:30pm Cost Free event, however, a $5 donation is requested, if possible, to cover drinks and nibbles Venue RMIT University Swanston Street Campus Megafex Room 2 Cropped image: Book cover, Displaced Archives, edited by James Building 8, Level 4, Room 13 Lowry, published in 2017 by Routledge 360 Swanston Street, Melbourne Seminar James Lowry is a lecturer at the Liverppol University Centre for Archive Studies and Chair of the Association of Commonwealth Archivists and Records Managers. Before joining the university, he was Deputy Director of the International Records Management Trust, leading records and archives projects across Africa, Europe and the Caribbean. His recent publications include Displaced Archives, an edited collection published by Routledge in 2017. In this seminar, James will discuss British colonial recordkeeping and its efects on records and archives in the post-colonial context, before looking at the particular problem of archival displacement during decolonisation. Please note, this is a special event, hence the changed date and time to usual Victorian Branch events. RSVP https://www.archivists.org.au/events/event/victorian-branch-seminar-archives-and-imperialism VIC Branch Meetings/Seminars First Wednesday of every month (except January and special events). Archives: Governance, Memory and Heritage - Richard Foy, Chief Archivist and General Manager, Archives New Zealand My grandfather was an alien. Not from a distant planet in a neighbouring solar system or a galaxy far, far away, but from rural mainland China. He arrived in Auckland, New Zealand, on 28 July 1907 as a lowly steerage-class passenger aboard the steamer SS Victoria from Sydney, and not at warp speed as the trusted helmsman of an interstellar starship. He was an alien, not of this planet, but of this new land of strange faces, foreign languages and inscrutable customs. He didn’t ask to be taken to our leader, but instead was unceremoniously instructed to give his fngerprints to the border authorities and pay the obligatory £100 poll tax that was levied against all Chinese immigrants entering New Zealand in that day. My grandfather, Wong Jim, remained an alien until he died in 1955. 111 years after Wong Jim was declared an alien of this country, I fnd myself as the Chief Archivist and General Manager of Archives New Zealand, the national archive of his foreign home. My grandfather, the itinerant market gardener, would no doubt be bemused to fnd that his grandson, whom he would never meet in his lifetime, is the statutory keeper of the very bureaucratic records - now public archives - that framed his ofcal status as an alien in Poll Tax certifcate butt recording immigration details of Wong Jim, Chinese New Zealand. It’s a bittersweet irony to me, the proud Chinese- alien / Source: Archives New Zealand Kiwi that the only documentary evidence of my grandfather’s alien life and existence in my birth country, are due to the shameful anti-Chinese immigration policies of colonial New Zealand, enshrined in statue under the Chinese Immigrants Act, 1881. But life, and archives, can be full of ironies. This story of my whakapapa draws together the grand notions of Governance, Memory and Heritage from the public world of archives, and connects them to my very personal place in the Universe. I never knew Wong Jim, as a beloved grandfather or as an honoured ancestor, because I was born almost two decades after his demise. I have no personal memory or recollection of him, but through the bureaucratic instruments that are now held safely in our national archive - the Chinese poll tax certifcate butts with his fngerprints and Chinese signature and the Alien Re-entry certifcates with his identity portraits - I am able to ‘remember’ him, even if it’s but a faint impression of who he was. In those archival records I see a man of 31 years who looks uncannily (and unfortunately) like my older brother Colin, and whom at age 49 is my dear father as I still picture him so clearly. And, after growing up as a self-efacing New Zealand- born Chinese boy trying so desperately to ft into an anglophile Kiwi culture, I’m fnally getting comfortable with accepting that I do possess Chinese identity and heritage, despite having a better grasp of Te Reo than my mother’s Cantonese. Wong Jim’s records, along with the poll tax certifcates of thousands of other Chinese men, and few women, are now an important reminder of the discriminatory immigration policies of a less enlightened New Zealand. The records and evidence of their alienation serve as our nation’s memory of a collective shame, but also connect recent generations of New Zealand Chinese, like myself, to a distinct heritage and culture from a distant land. More recently, in my role as Chief Archivist, I’ve come to understand the deeper value of our archives beyond just being ‘memories’ of cultural heritage. I’ve seen them as holding the evidence by which past governments are held accountable for their policies and actions. In 2002, the New Zealand government, under Prime Minister Helen Clarke, formally apologised to the New Zealand Chinese community for having forced payment of poll tax from 1881 until 1944. Thanks, Wong Jim! And than you, New Zealand government bureaucracy and your damned efcient public recordkeeping! Dr Valerie Johnson, Director of Research and Collections, The National Archives, UK Archives: Governance, Memory and Heritage So: ‘Archives: Governance, Memory and Heritage’. This was the title given to me - and I was to interpret it as I wished. I looked at the title. There was an obvious subject staring back at me - the importance of governance in the management of records, in the holding and use, preservation and access to records which document memory and comprise our written heritage. In England, on 25 May 2018, a new legal framework, the General Data Protection Regulations or GDPR, will come into force. These regulations reinforce the current Data Protection regulations, and lock into law greater responsibilities for those processing and using personal data alongside greater rights to data privacy and consent for the individuals who are the subjects. Archives even have a special mention: a dispensation to enable them to keep data and records that constitute “archiving in the public interest”. Image: Access between East and West Berlin, 1962 / Photographer: unknown / Source: The National Archives, FO 371/163600 (2) I could have written about that. But it seemed that that would be the predictable thing to write about, that kind of governance. And I didn’t want to write the obvious. In addition, it seemed to me on refection that is the very ungovernability of archives that is one of their greatest strengths. What do I mean by that? Much has been written about the role of archives in repressive regimes, controlling people through their documents. Yet it is important to remember that it is not the archives or records themselves that are doing this, but people using records to faciliatate abuse and control that is the issue. And this is not a pedantic distinction. Because it seems to me that it is these very same archives or records, which, later on, become the means to bring these people to justice, to provide evidence for abuses, to be the key to accountability, and to be often the means - sometimes the only means - by which victims of repression and abuse can recover memories. In this way, the records themselves are actually subversive: initially silent witness to events, at worse, the means to support repression and abuse, over time, they take on the opposite function, to become the very weapons with which to fght that repression and abuse. As such they also become dangerous: witness the Stasi fles, which during the Communist regime in East Germany, were products of repression and tools with which to prosecute and punish. When the tide turned, the records turned too, into a witness against their creators; and those same fles, husbanded and carefully stored, were suddenly something that needed to be destroyed, too dangerous to exist. Many were shredded, but even these survived, and so-called Puzzle Women work to reconstitute the shredded pieces back into whole sheets, so important are they as witness, memory and heritage. For me, this subversive, dangerous nature of archives - this ungovernable nature of archives - is one of the main reasons that archives are so important. Because archives speak ‘the truth’ - and that too is a dangerous thing to say. In this world of postmodernism, what is truth? I know there is no single truth, no whole truth and certainly not ‘nothing but the truth’ in archives, but archives certainly provide evidence, stand as witness, even if only to say, somewhat paradoxically, this is a record of bigotry, or of falseness.