Archives and Societal Provenance. Australian Essays

334 Pages·2012·10.986 MB·English

by  Michael Piggott (Auth.)

Archives and Societal Provenance
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Archives and Societal
Provenance
Australian essays
M P
ICHAEL IGGOTT
Oxford Cambridge New Delhi
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First published in 2012
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© M. Piggott, 2012
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A prologue to the afterlife
Professor Michael Moss
Ex America semper aliquid novi or, Canberra calling are you
receiving me?
We would substitute Australia in this Latin tag, which Sir Hilary
Jenkinson used in his review of T.R. Schellenberg’s Modern Archives:
Principles and Techniques,1 but we on the other side of the world would,
I hope, employ it with respect and not heavy irony. In this combination
of new writing and a selection from his oeuvre across his working life
and into ‘retirement’, which Michael has put together himself rather than
leave it to others to do so when he has shuffled off his mortal coil, he
returns often to the debate between these two titans who dominated
professional practice and literature during his long career as a scholar
and archivist, or perhaps it should be the other way round.
When he invited me to open the ‘batting’ apart from the memorable
tweet ‘Canberra calling’, like a kookaburra caught in a snare, he gave me
no instructions or advice. It seemed impolite to say no or words to that
effect. Perhaps others had done so; he assures me they had not. I was his
first choice to open against the Aussies. The very act of his contacting me
by e-mail emphasises the tractability and potential for interaction that
the Internet affords, not just to scholars but to everyone who engages
with archives and much else besides. As Alexander Stille reminds us in
The Future of the Past, genealogy ranks a close second to pornography
as the most popular activity on the Internet.2 The affordance of the
Internet, overlooked by many scholars, is the context in which these
essays should be read.
It is the task of the writer of prefaces not to ‘bury Caesar, but to praise
him’, to parody Marc Antony. I want to go further by exploring how the
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many balls Michael has hit towards the boundary throughout his career,
often by poking fun at the self-image of his countrymen, will not be
‘interred with his bones’. One of Michael’s cris de cœur is for more
research into archival practice in the context of Australia. I would want
to go further. ‘Up here’ we have made a start by looking at the way
recordkeeping practice seeped through what has come to be known as
the British Empire. It is easy to imagine that from the European discovery
of Australia and settlement in other parts of the world there was some
kind of grand Kiplingesque imperial project. You only have to read
Stephanie Williams’ new book Running the Show, a collection of
vignettes of pro-consuls, to realise what a creaky outfit it was until
Joseph Chamberlain arrived at the Colonial Office in 1895 and started
to bring order out of chaos, which included a degree of autonomy to the
so-called white colonies.3 Nevertheless there was a way of doing things,
however imperfectly, borrowed largely from the equally chaotic home
civil service. For recordkeeping that was the registry system which in a
long gestation from about the time of the so-called Tudor revolution in
government emerged pretty much fully fledged at the end of the
nineteenth century.4
This was wonderfully lampooned by Anthony Trollope, who himself
held a senior position in the Post Office, in his novel The Three Clerks.
At the core of the registry system was the docket from which the file
creakily developed and for which Trollope composed this little ditty:
My heart’s at my office, my heart is always there –
My heart’s at my office, docketing with care;
Docketing the papers, and copying all day,
My heart’s at my office, though I be far away.5
The office in question was the fictitious department of Inland Navigation.
When it was abolished as part of the reform of the civil service in 1853
‘and the dull, dingy rooms were vacant. Ruthless men shovelled off as
waste paper all the lock entries of which Charley [Tudor – one of the three
clerks] had once been so proud; and the ponderous ledgers, which
Mr. Snape [another clerk] had delighted to haul about, were sent away
into Cimmerian darkness, and probably to utter destruction.’6 Another
of the three clerks, Alaric Tudor, having served a prison sentence for
embezzlement, emigrates to Australia no doubt imposing on his adopted
country the recordkeeping systems learned in his early career that were
so full of promise.
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Prologue by Professor Michael Moss
We can speculate from Michael’s essay ‘War, sacred archiving and
C.E.W. Bean’, which forms Chapter 8 of this volume, that British registry
practice must have impacted on Bean’s work. He would have seen it
meticulously implemented in Lloyd George’s wartime Ministry of
Munitions and the efforts that were made to preserve its registry so as to
write its multi-volume history.7 When he became Prime Minister in 1916
Lloyd George took the practice with him to the Cabinet Office and in the
immediate aftermath of the war set up the Treasury O&M department
to police its introduction across Whitehall and the colonial possessions.8
Concern about the history of recordkeeping is one I share with Michael,
not simply because it is of academic interest, but emphatically because it
is the foundations on which democratic societies with their commitment
to social justice and the rule of law are built.9 The Treasury O&M
department warrants investigation from every corner of the
Commonwealth.
We must, however, beware of claiming too much. Michael is right
when he cautions in Chapter 12 ‘what archival science lacks is a theory
for a sociology of recordkeeping’. Do not ‘ruthless men’ armed with
shovels make a greater impact than one or two timid archivists? Here is
fertile ground for trans-disciplinary engagement that I have recently
explored in ‘Is it a question of trust or why are we afraid to go to
Nineveh?’10 I cite this only because by drawing attention to this lacuna,
Michael opens the door onto the solipsistic nature of much archival
research for which he chides us good humouredly from other perspectives.
We will come to these. A ‘sociology of recordkeeping’ must embrace
power relationships which we could describe less starkly as governance,
something that is lacking in the continuum model for which Michael
only gives two less than hearty cheers in Chapter 12.
Let us explore for a moment what this might mean. For Anthony
Giddens, on whose structuration theory the continuum model is built,
this came about because of the asymmetry in the distribution of resources
that inevitably leads to a dialectic of control where those without
resources seek to win power or at least influence ‘the circumstances of
action of others’.11 It is in these interactions that ‘meaning’ is dynamically
created by the process of ‘double hermeneutics’ and by extension records
generated. For dialogue to take place within such a dialectic, information
systems must be both trusted and trustworthy – ‘With the development
of abstract systems, trust in impersonal principles, as well as in
anonymous others, becomes indispensable to social existence.’12 Although
Michael eschews, I suspect deliberately, such language, he returns
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Archives and Societal Provenance
repeatedly to the relationship between those who only leave shallow
footprints on the face of history and the powerful who bequeath
abundant archives. He cites Australians’ innate dislike of self-
aggrandisement and an overbearing government that has its roots firmly
in the English Civil War.
Like Carl Becker in his famous – and to some infamous – presidential
address to the American Historical Association in 1931, Michael
champions the notion of ‘everyone their own archivist’ in his penetrating
essay on Percy Grainger in Chapter 13.13 He devotes much of his
eschatological musings on the afterlife to personal recordkeeping, while
ignoring the other balls he has happily hit over the boundary on his
journey for us to find in the long grass (Epilogue). This is where, as
Alexander Stille reminded us, the Internet and social networking is
making such an enormous impact and much of it is happening despite us
and despite the academy. To some this is anathema, to others it is more
than welcome. The flip side of the dialectic is the way in which those in
power construct the image of their lives and deliberately cloak themselves
in a mythology that suits their purpose, explored in the wonderfully
funny account, tinged with bathos, of Bob Hawke and the lily pond in
Chapter 5.
I recently had dinner with someone who had been private secretary to
one of Margaret Thatcher’s ministers and I was surprised that they
deliberately encouraged the ‘lady’s not for turning’ image so that when
they introduced more moderate legislation than expected it was
applauded and passed without comment. Such behaviour raises doubts
in both my mind and the other Michael’s about claims archivists make
about objectivity and the dark art of ‘appraisal’ with little thought for
the ‘ruthless men’ and women for that matter (Chapter 11). As Mary
Mitford warned us in her delightful Our Village published in 1828, these
self-constructed grandees – ‘the stiff cravat, the pinched-in waist, the
dandy walk – oh they will never do for cricket. Now our country lads,
accustomed to the flail or the hammer ... have the free use of their arms;
they know how to move their shoulders; and they can move their feet too –
they can run.’
It is the stories of such country lads that intrigues Michael and can
often surprise us in the way they bisect the lives of the famous. As
children we were entertained every Christmas by the charming Misses
Thrush, small delicate ladies who taught the piano; but they were
astonishingly the nieces of the great and enormous Dr W.G. Grace and
the house was discreetly full of his memorabilia and they in turn of
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Prologue by Professor Michael Moss
stories about the cricketing achievements of their famous uncle. We sat
goggle-eyed as we were told how their uncle with his dog as fielder had
beaten the Gloucestershire eleven. There can be little doubt that the
affordances the Internet provides for individuals to tell the stories they
research and assemble is transforming the way we think about archives.
Without it I would never have known that the bulk of my radical family
emigrated freely to Australia in the mid-nineteenth century.14 Michael is
right to end with the personal.
If it is puzzling that archivists will not go to Nineveh and prefer to
remain with Jonah among the rhubarb, it is even more puzzling to both
of us as to why so few historians trouble to come to see us in our rhubarb
patches to use archives. Michael lays the blame partly at the door of the
archivists and the collapse in the relationship with historians. It is
fashionable to attribute this in large measure to Jenkinson, but in his
valedictory lecture at University College London Jenkinson said nothing
of the kind:
[The Archivist] will almost certainly make from time to time
interesting discoveries and must sometimes be allowed the pleasure
of following them up, in off hours, himself. The appropriate motto
seems to be, if I may vary the metaphor, ‘Thou shalt not muzzle the
ox that treadeth out the corn.’15
A more likely explanation is, as Michael suggests, the reification of the
‘Archive’, if I can be permitted a Jenkinsonian capital, combined with a
mindless managerialism that pervades the curatorial profession and on
the historians’ side, at least in the United Kingdom, a collapse of what
used to be called courses in sources and methods, despite the fact that
nearly all history programmes now include a mandatory dissertation.
The need for a reconnection is a powerful undercurrent running through
these essays. Michael’s face is turned relentlessly towards history and the
historian in a way that is both salutary and refreshing. What he has in
mind is not historische, but what the Germans call Geschichte, a study
of the past that transcends the human sciences. In the cause he supported
to preserve records of Australian business, an endeavour that occupied
much of my early career on the other side of the world, the historian
hardly features (Chapter 10). I was luckier, but only the exceptional
business historian grapples with the complexity of accounting records
that dominate such holdings. They prefer the quiet waters of press-
cutting books.
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Archives and Societal Provenance
Similarly in the defence of collecting archives, mostly within universities,
the historian is cast as an admiring beneficiary of archival ‘alchemy’ and
not as a figure on the barricades, apart from R.H. Tawney in his ‘stout
pair of boots’. He would have been more use than most, as he would
have had his sniper’s rifle. It is a little known fact that he was among the
most accurate snipers on the Western Front. From my perspective
archivists and historians often talk past each other, because few historians
have the confidence to paint as wide a canvas and engage with theory as
Michael does in these essays. This is almost certainly because unlike
archivists, who are expected to be experts on the whole range of their
holdings, historians to advance their careers specialise narrowly and can
be accused of being even more solipsistic than archivists.
Now let me turn to orality – a theme which Michael does not add to
his eschatological charge to those he leaves behind but to my mind is
central to the encounter between cultures with a written and oral
tradition such as Australia. It is one that dominates any discussion of
colonial recordkeeping and administration and deserves much more
attention. If as we now know from the discovery of written evidence
from the Neolithic period there is only a tenuous sequence from orality
to a written culture, why is it some cultures embrace memorialisation
through writing and others remain wedded to an oral tradition even in
some parts of the world to this day?16 When Dr Banda took power in the
newly independent Malawi, he deliberately returned to traditional
orality so that he could avoid any form of audit and set himself above
the rule of Western-style law with its reliance on written evidence. We
can even see the same tendencies in the West to avoid freedom of
information requests.
This is a complex question that demands a transnational and a
transdisciplinary response. Michael addresses orality in Chapter 16 from
a largely diachronic perspective, which in the light of European
occupation with its long tradition of written culture, is understandable.
We need comparative studies and we can now deliver these easily if we
have the will by taking advantage of the affordances of the Internet.
Michael asserts that the stick carriers bore the message in their heads and
were both medium and message – long before McLuhan, but almost
certainly those who carried Charlemagne’s sealed letters did not. In
neither case do the messages survive, but we know they were carried.
The preservation of the oral tradition in modern societies is also
contested territory. Some look back to an imagined halcyon past while
others argue that modernity is the only means of preservation: witness
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