Selective rememberings? Access to ‘private’ documents at the National Archives of Australia

Daniel Casey and Joshua Black

Introduction¹

In Australia, academics and journalists have repeatedly invoked the ‘public interest’ and ‘the right to know’ in pursuit of administrative transparency.² That perceived right is equally important, though not always effectively embodied, in national archives and other political and administrative record keeping institutions. These institutions, such as the National Archives of Australia (NAA), known as the Australian Archives (AA) between 1975 and 1998, ‘hold … the memory of our nation’ to ‘shape our future and help safeguard our democracy’ and support ‘integrity and accountability in public administration’.³ For researchers, the value of these institutions derives from their collection of both government documents and personal papers from a range of influential individuals. This means that their acquisition policies, depositing processes and access restrictions can profoundly affect the Australian nation’s capacity to know.

While this volume is focused on ‘public humanities’ and how our cultural institutions need to operate to face current and emerging challenges, this article is concerned with the risk of privatised humanities, with vital records of former Australian ministers, prime ministers and governors-general not being accessible by the public. The issue was thrust onto the mainstream political agenda by the so-called ‘Palace Letters’ case, which considered whether letters between former governor-general Sir John Kerr and the Queen were ‘private’ or ‘official’, and therefore whether they could be viewed by historian Jenny Hocking and indeed the public at large. Were these documents, so vital to our understanding of Australian political history, destined to be public, or were they to be kept private, potentially in perpetuity? As this case demonstrated, researchers’ access to these documents can be severely limited, or even denied, due to restrictions imposed by depositors such as former politicians and governors-general. While Hocking was successful in that case, there are many similar restrictions on a large range of other important papers.

Leaving sensational cases such as that one aside for the time being, this article addresses how Australia handles the papers of its former political leaders. How does this affect researchers’ access to these documents? And how does it shape our understanding of Australian history and public administration? In the wake of the decision in Hocking v. Director-General of the National Archives of Australia, what do our findings mean for researchers and the study of our history?

This article uses freedom of information (FOI) requests made by Daniel Casey to the NAA, which sought to obtain details of donations from former prime ministers and ministers to the NAA; archival research; interviews with staff members of former prime minister John Howard; and documentary research.

The article concludes that Australian approaches to personal political papers have been roughshod, inconsistent and too reliant on the good will of individuals with distinctly personal agendas. The introduction of eponymous prime ministerial research centres, along with the NAA’s new personal records acquisition framework, which focuses on former prime ministers and governors-general, further privileges the ‘official’ view of history rather than engaging with multiple voices, and reflects an unintended return of the ‘great man’ view of history. Based on these findings, we make specific recommendations to improve the management of the papers of former (prime) ministers to ensure that our history remains public, rather than private.

A turf war or paper cuts? The history of collecting private political papers

The legislative underpinnings of Australia’s official record keeping architecture at the federal level is the Archives Act, 1983, which requires that records of ‘national significance or public interest’ (particularly those relating to the ‘history or government of Australia’) be retained and transferred to the NAA for preservation.⁴ While this appears to work reasonably well for the vast majority of records that are created, managed and kept within the multitude of public service departments (gross irregularities notwithstanding),⁵ the system does not work anywhere near as well for (prime) ministerial records.

When a prime minister leaves office, the paperwork in their possession constitutes a mixture of official and private records.⁶ As former director-general of the NAA Robert Neale put it, ‘official and private material is inextricably mixed’.⁷ There is no ‘default’ Australian arrangement for the requisitioning, handling and depositing of these materials. Ministerial staff often replicate official records for the minister’s personal use, and often these are then kept by the individual minister in their personal papers. In the wake of election defeats, bruising leadership contests and personal resignations, (prime) ministers quickly gather their documents into boxes and depart with them. For some former ministers, these papers ultimately go on to form the foundation of a political memoir.⁸ In principle, such practices may breach the Crimes Act, 1914 or the Archives Act, but there is little that public servants can do to prevent former Commonwealth officeholders from replicating and reviewing these quasi-personal records.⁹

The situation was far worse in the years before the Archives Act was drafted and legislated. As Gideon Haigh has observed, the ‘national collecting mission’ was ‘uneasily divided’ in the mid-twentieth century between the fledgling Commonwealth Archives Office, which was tasked with preserving official papers, and the National Library of Australia (NLA), which courted the families of prominent public figures for deposits of personal papers.¹⁰ ‘Relations between the senior staff of the two institutions’, one manuscript librarian at the NLA later wrote, ‘were often frosty’.¹¹ In that environment, cunning former leaders proved adept at the time-tested art of divide and conquer, evading requirements to surrender official documents by brazenly asserting private ownership, or alternately depositing them in the NLA, safely beyond the reach of the public service and officers of the Commonwealth Archives. As Patrick Mullins has shown, former prime minister William McMahon deposited his extensive collection of papers (both official and private in nature) at the NLA, and later had them returned to his own personal office to aid his quest to write a political autobiography.¹² In this fashion, McMahon managed to preside over Treasury documents, Cabinet minutes and highly classified intelligence material in a relatively unprotected office in Sydney’s Westfield Towers.¹³ Ultimately, McMahon died, the autobiography was never finished or published, and the papers returned to the NLA where they remain near-inaccessible even to such a thoughtful historian as Mullins.

A reform process commenced in the late 1970s that was intended to transform this unwieldy and inefficient state of affairs. The Archives Act and the Freedom of Information Act, 1982, understood to be ‘very much a sister piece of legislation’, were intended to strike the right balance between confidentiality and transparency, disclosure and discretion.¹⁴ When these pieces of legislation were first introduced and considered, private papers were readily identified as a potential problem. Reviewing the Archives Bill in 1978, the Senate Standing Committee on Education and the Arts received a range of submissions, with some arguing that the proposed legislatively established Australian Archives should be prevented from collecting private papers. The two key concerns were that the AA would ‘compete’ with the NLA, state libraries and university libraries for important documents and manuscripts; and that the AA might restrict public access to these personal papers.

One of the main reasons advanced for the NAA continuing to collect personal papers is to enable former government officials to donate the entirety of their collection, without forcing them to split it between ‘private’ and ‘official’. There are clear benefits to this unity, given that these two categories are often ‘inextricably mixed’,¹⁵ not only physically (as the former director-general of the NAA suggested) but also over time and between people. The committee accepted these arguments about the benefits of allowing the NAA to continue collecting personal papers, and their view prevailed in the final legislation. As a result, section 5(f) of the Archives Act explicitly allows the NAA to ‘to seek to obtain, and to have the care and management of, material (including Commonwealth records) not in the custody of a Commonwealth institution’. Section 6(2) allows the NAA to agree to specific access conditions (including longer closure periods) for personal papers, which ‘have effect notwithstanding anything contained in Division 3 of Part V’ (which governs access to Commonwealth records). This provision gives the NAA, and the donor, significant leeway in decisions on how donated papers are managed. However, the Archives Act also provides that any Commonwealth records within these personal collections are governed by the normal access conditions set out in the Act.

The Archives Bill was held up in committee deliberations because members of parliament (MPs) could not agree on the inclusion of the records of the Office of the Governor-General, specifically, vice-regal correspondence with the palace, in the broader designation of ‘Commonwealth records’. Changes to these provisions were essential to the final passage of the Bill. When the Bill was finally passed in the early months of the Hawke Labor government in 1983, the matter had been firmly resolved: all records created in the course of discharging an official duty, including vice-regal correspondence, would be deemed Commonwealth property.¹⁶ In his second reading speech, Home Affairs Minister Barry Cohen stressed that the Archives Act would ensure the ‘proper management’ of and ‘public access’ to Commonwealth records.¹⁷

NAA takes the lead: Current practice

Having set out the legislative history and framework, we can now look at the practice. This section will explore how the NAA collects personal records before discussing the type and length of access restrictions that individuals have imposed on their deposited papers. Despite the aspirations reflected in the Archives Act, subsequent practice has rarely lived up to its promise of transparency and accessibility.

The donation of papers by former prime ministers and governors-general is now commonplace. A search of the NAA catalogue reveals that more than 266 metres of papers donated by former prime minister John Howard, for example, are already in the open-access period. The new NAA acquisitions policy, released in March 2022, states that:

The National Archives actively seeks to acquire non-Commonwealth or personal records of national significance and public interest, which complement the archival resources of the Commonwealth, retain evidence of accountable government, and provide a source for future scholarship.

Our priority is to collect personal records of governors-general and prime ministers. We may also consider acquiring records collected by other significant individuals associated with the Commonwealth Government.¹⁸

Together, the NAA’s legislative framework and acquisitions policy have facilitated the collection of a substantial corpus of personal papers encompassing both Commonwealth and private records. Howard, for example, has donated papers across his political career, covering his initial entry into parliament in 1974, his ministerial activities in the Fraser government (1975–83), his period in Opposition (1983–96) and his period as prime minister (1996–2007). Similarly, the NAA holds significant collections of Shadow Cabinet papers, including from then Opposition leader Malcolm Fraser in 1975, which are crucial for historians and political scientists to understand the events around the dismissal of the Whitlam government. There are also Shadow Cabinet papers from a range of politicians including Laurie Brereton, Gough Whitlam, John Faulkner, Peter Costello, Bronwyn Bishop and Andrew Peacock. These papers can help paint a much more comprehensive picture of Australian political history than the official record alone.

However, the removal of the need to carefully separate ‘private’ and ‘official’ papers, and the lack of controls preventing executive officeholders from retaining official documents, afford the NAA and individual politicians enormous discretion over a much larger collection of material than is desirable. As noted above, it was common for outgoing ministers and prime ministers to retain originals and/or marked copies of official paperwork. Despite the introduction of the Archives Act, this pattern seems to have continued, with little accountability and even less consequence. In June 1991, after a failed leadership challenge, Treasurer Paul Keating returned to the backbench and took a substantial archive with him. One of his newly minted advisers, Dr John Edwards, relocated to The Australian National University for a brief spell to begin work on a biography of his boss. ‘I took the entire collection of [Keating’s] personal office files to the Australian National University’s Research School of Social Sciences’, Edwards explained in the preface of his subsequent book. The archive contained ‘thousands of documents’, most of which were likely Commonwealth property or duplicates thereof.¹⁹ It appears that a similar process occurred when Keating departed the prime minister’s office five years later. All of the original Cabinet minutes and submissions of the 1980s and 1990s were archived in the usual fashion, but other significant materials from Keating’s office were taken and stored in a self-storage warehouse in Alexandria, only to be destroyed in a blaze in February 2003. Sydney’s Daily Telegraph reported that the ‘equivalent of a presidential library’ had been lost, and a spokesperson for Keating claimed that the records had been ‘of historic and public interest’.²⁰ The records were described as ‘personal papers’, but it is likely that the archive contained material better understood as Commonwealth records.

An FOI request by Casey identified an internal memo, written by a public servant at the NAA in 1988, noting that a former economic adviser to Minster Bob Hawke appeared to have taken his copies of Cabinet submissions with him. The memo expressed concern that they may be ‘stored in a garage or similar’.²¹ This practice of taking personal copies of official material continued in the Howard government. A former member of Howard’s staff has confirmed to one of the authors that they:

would keep a copy of the letter even, whether it was to a member of the public or to another Minister, we would keep a copy. And every month we put into boxes every single bit of paper the PM had seen that month. And there were, by the time I left, there was a room full of boxes, box after box after box of paper that, all month by month, year by year … it was put aside as the Prime Minister’s records … we were meticulous in keeping everything for Howard and month by month, whatever.²²

And as recently as 2022, it appears that ministers in the outgoing Morrison government sought to keep copies of official government documents. An FOI request reveals that the Department of Home Affairs sought advice from the NAA about the treatment of duplicate Commonwealth records. In turn, the NAA advised that ‘there is no scenario where the Minister gets to keep copies—at least not without [the NAA] giving special, specific permission’.²³ Whether the recently departed administration adhered to these principles more scrupulously than their predecessors is yet unclear.

These caches of documents, potentially unlawfully removed in the first place, are well represented among the personal collections that are then ‘donated’ to the NAA. For example, series M4326, entitled ‘Ministerial Correspondence of John Winston Howard as Prime Minister’, currently contains around 1,500 items in the open-access period, each containing his paperwork for that day (his daily program; briefs from the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet; correspondence he saw or signed; and Cabinet agenda). They are a mix of original documents (such as letters from international dignitaries, his ministers and members of the public), and photocopies, which, as noted above, were made by his staff for him to retain after the originals had been returned to his department. It is unclear why the originals were kept by Howard and his office, rather than being provided to his department for appropriate action and filing on a departmental record. Regardless, they are ‘official’ documents. The issue that then arises is that we do not know how the NAA is treating this type of archival series. It is an ‘M’ series, which indicates that it was donated by a Commonwealth person, and the metadata shows that the agency/person recording and controlling the documents was Howard, rather than his department, and directs researchers to ‘refer to the depositor agreement for access conditions’. This indicates that the NAA is treating at least some of the documents as private, although the depositor agreement itself is not provided, making it difficult for researchers to refer to it. Treating ‘official’ papers as ‘private’ is particularly an issue where a donor may choose an extended closure period (such as 30 years, rather than the statutory 20 for most records, or until after their death). This situation is also creating significant problems under the Freedom of Information Act, which exempts documents that have been donated to the NAA but does not exempt documents transferred by Commonwealth agencies.²⁴

While Howard appears to have donated the vast bulk of his paperwork, it is less clear how comprehensive are other donations of personal records. Relying on individuals to ‘donate’ material that they removed from their ministerial office creates a slow, ad hoc and discretionary system. In December 2018, the NAA advised a Senate Committee that former prime ministers Kevin Rudd, Julia Gillard, Tony Abbott and Malcolm Turnbull had not provided their official diaries to the NAA, even though they had been out of office for some time.²⁵ It is unclear where those diaries are (or if they have now been transferred to the NAA); for example, they may have been appropriately filed with the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet. FOI requests made by Casey to the NAA show that Turnbull sent a two-line email from his personal email address on his iPad to the director-general of the NAA in 2019 saying: ‘I have a [REDACTED]. Are you interested in them?’²⁶ Similarly, there were significant delays in physically acquiring Rudd’s records. He left office for the second time in 2013, but FOI requests show that it was two years before he transferred around 100 boxes of material, with the NAA noting that ‘some of the records … were expected to be sensitive or classified in nature’.²⁷ This raises questions about why Rudd, and other former prime ministers, continued to hold classified material for years after leaving government. It was proposed that further material from Rudd’s office be transferred in late 2016, but it is not clear whether this consignment included any Commonwealth records.²⁸

The problem remains that, for many papers, even once they reach the NAA, the distinction between ‘private’ and ‘official’ is murky. At one end of the spectrum is paperwork from a politician’s time on the backbench or in Opposition. These documents cannot have been generated in the course of discharging any duties of executive office, and therefore cannot be ‘official’.²⁹ Less clear, however, is material such as letters from the Liberal Party Federal Secretariat about public opinion on a range of government policies,³⁰ a letter from a teenager about joining the Liberal Party³¹ or a letter about internal Liberal Party pre-selection matters.³² While it could be argued that these papers are ‘party political’ rather than ‘official’, most would have received responses from the prime minister’s office, using publicly funded ‘Office of the Prime Minister’ stationery with the Commonwealth coat of arms, and written and signed by publicly funded officials. The fact that official ‘government’ responses rather than Liberal Party responses were provided indicates that these should similarly be treated as ‘official’ records.

Unfortunately, neither the original 1978 Senate Committee that considered the Archives Bill, nor the Australian Law Reform Commission, considered the definition of ‘private’ papers, including whether and when papers from former (prime) ministers were ‘private’. However, in evidence to the Senate Committee, Neale noted:

The papers of Lord Bruce, for example, are called personal papers. They are copies of every cable sent by Bruce and received by Bruce while he was in office in London, every record of conversation he had with every ambassador and with every British official, and of records, of which he should never have made, of debates which took place in the British War Cabinet. There is nothing whatsoever private or personal about them. They are copies of official records and in the [Archives Bill] sense they are copies of Commonwealth records … Many other Ministers have followed this practice and they have kept in their offices complete sets of copies of correspondence crossing their desk.³³

Neale noted that, in some instances, ministers or senior public servants made copies for their own records; however, the mere fact that an official document has been photocopied does not mean that it is no longer an ‘official’ document. As Justice Edelman noted in Hocking, ‘the principle of loyalty which underlies public office, and which precludes public officers from benefiting personally from their office’ would effectively preclude a former (prime) minister gaining ownership of an official document merely by making a copy.³⁴ This was Hocking’s central contention in the legal contest over the ‘Palace Letters’. In that case, to draft his own political autobiography Matters for Judgement (1978), the former governor-general had asked the official secretary at Yarralumla, David Smith, to discreetly photocopy his vice-regal correspondence with the palace. Smith did so, on site at Government House, using institutional resources, in the dead of night when all else were asleep. Hocking made the further point that Smith not only played a role in creating the duplicates of these official records, but also in creating the originals in his capacity as official secretary.³⁵ While not the case in Hocking, in most cases, the copies were usually made for an official purpose, by a person in their official capacity, using official resources, and the information contained therein remained official, and often classified.

Nevertheless, these personal records collections are vital, not least because they reveal, in their structure, what they individual who curated them found important. Further, they matter because finding these same documents in departmental records collections is often impossible, either because of disjointed and unclear record keeping practices, or because they have been destroyed.

Formal, informal and cultural restrictions on access

Having shown the importance of the distinction between ‘private’ and ‘official’ papers, we now turn to examining what restrictions donors have placed on their papers, as well as other forms of access restrictions. Broadly, we identify two classes of restrictions, those imposed by the donor and those imposed by the NAA.

As explained above, section 6(2) of the Archives Act allows donors to place access restrictions on their donations. Within ‘donor-imposed’ restrictions, there are two types of additional access restrictions: donors may choose an extended closure period and they may impose additional requirements for access (such as approval of the donor’s family). For example, Fraser wrote in 1983:

Until my death, access shall be granted only with my personal authority … After my death, if my wife survives me, access shall be granted only with the personal authority of my wife … After the death of my wife and myself, access may be granted to serious students of history [who have] an established professional standing and reputation, at the expiration of 30 years from the date of lodgement of the said papers.³⁶

Fraser included both types of restrictions: an extended closure period of 30 years measured from the date of lodgement of the papers (in this case 1983), rather than the year of their creation, as then applied to most official records; plus additional approval requirements during the life of the depositor and in perpetuity. Importantly, the ongoing limitation that access would be limited to ‘serious students of history [who have] an established standing and reputation’ could be interpreted as preventing many journalists, amateur historians, PhD candidates or early career researchers from gaining access to Fraser’s papers. While it is not clear how this provision is being interpreted and applied by NAA staff, the question is whether such restrictions are ever appropriate or acceptable. Specific restrictions (such as limiting access to certain individuals) were also placed on some of their papers by prime ministers Whitlam, Keating and Hawke. Prime Minster Howard placed no restrictions on his papers.³⁷

The second class of restrictions are those imposed by the NAA itself, whether explicitly or through institutional culture. These can be considered under four main categories. First, the NAA does not publish the instruments of deposit, even though, in many instances, its own online search engine, RecordSearch, expressly directs researchers to this instrument to determine access conditions. These were not provided to one of the authors when requested, and he was forced to apply under the Freedom of Information Act, after which they were eventually released. Second, some donated records series, such as some of those belonging to Paul Keating, have no items on RecordSearch at all.³⁸ Gaining access to anything in these series becomes an ‘unknown unknowns’ challenge.

Third, there continues to be a significant delay in the NAA reviewing and opening records for public examination. While the Archives Act imposes a statutory 90-day timeframe, the NAA recently advised that it is dealing with more 20,000 access applications that were submitted more than a year ago, with more than half of those submitted more than five years ago.³⁹ This means that applications submitted at the start of a PhD may still be outstanding at the end of a postdoctoral program. These delays are neither new nor isolated. Indeed, journalists were reporting on them as early as 1985, just one year after the implementation of the Archives Act.⁴⁰ Similarly, the NAA’s 2018–19 Annual Report (chosen to avoid any COVID-related impacts) shows that almost a third of complex applications took more than the statutory 90 days to be finalised, and that the NAA had a backlog of more than 20,000 applications. A significant proportion of the delay is due to the legislated need to consult other agencies: more than 2,300 applications that are over five years old are pending advice from the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. Departments are not held accountable for these delays, as there are no statutory timeframes imposed on other agencies to respond to the NAA. In addition, the NAA appears to prioritise its proactive release program, which facilitates the release of certain documents without a specific public access request. The documents released under this program often appear targeted at genealogists and family historians (with a significant focus on military records), whom the NAA then charges for record digitisation. For example, in 2021–22, 622,573 records were examined for release, of which less than 5 per cent were in response to access applications from the public—the balance were part of the proactive release program.⁴¹ This prioritisation is bound to cause delays in processing those records that are actively sought by researchers.

Finally, there is evidence for significant delays in processing existing material, which prevents researchers from gaining access to it. For example, Prime Minister Gillard donated material from as early as 1992,⁴² which, in the normal course of events, should have entered the open-access period in 2013. However, as of 1 November 2022, none of Gillard’s material is available through the NAA’s RecordSearch interface.

Each of these small decisions—deciding what is ‘worthy’ of keeping, what access requests to prioritise, what materials are on RecordSearch, what access conditions the NAA will accept—builds a culture that makes ‘some stories eligible for historical rehearsal and others not’.⁴³ In 2006, the NAA decided to expand the scope of its private records collections to include those of ‘leaders of the Opposition and minor parties in order to reflect the broad range of individuals involved and influential in Government decision-making’.⁴⁴ However, this was reversed a decade later with a decision to ‘narrow the scope of records the Archives seeks to acquire and [redefine] the priority target categories’⁴⁵ to include only former Prime ministers and governors-general, as well as others who had already previously donated their records. This selective records management was reinforced in the 2022 policy, which continued to restrict the NAA’s focus to former prime ministers and governors-general, and, therefore, to contain the ‘official’ view of history, rather than engaging with multiple voices,⁴⁶ such as leaders of the Opposition who were never prime minister and other significant parliamentarians, including leaders of minor parties. Would the NAA have collected the papers of Australia’s first female parliamentarians or Cabinet ministers, or first Indigenous parliamentarians or Cabinet ministers under this new acquisitions policy?

Indeed, the logical consequence of the NAA’s acquisition policy is a continuation of the ‘great man’ conception of history that historians have spent the past century disavowing. Unlike the Victorian intellectual Thomas Carlyle, contemporary historians do not believe that the ‘history of the world is but the biography of great men’.⁴⁷ (Nor, we hasten to add, was this the sum total of Carlyle’s beliefs about individuals in history.⁴⁸) In that light, the NAA’s acquisitions policy appears somewhat regressive. Parliamentarians who are women, or Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islanders, or who sit as Independent MPs are actively deprioritised in the NAA’s avowed acquisition agenda. The NAA risks conflating national history with elite political biography, which in turn courts the accusation, as Blair Williams has suggested, that ‘women’s lives and women’s stories are not worth recording’.⁴⁹

Going forward and the fallout from Hocking

Significant further discussion about how our political history is managed will be needed after Hocking. The case ensured that the ‘personal and confidential’ correspondence between governors-general and the Crown is regarded as official material, which must be provided to the NAA and eventually made public. However, the case leaves many questions unanswered, including in relation to documents that are kept in ministerial offices. It is broadly accepted that there will be both ‘personal’ and ‘official’ documents in a minister’s office, and indeed the High Court noted that these categories exist on a spectrum—they are not binary. However, recognition of a spectrum of categorisation brings us no closer to better archival practice.

Justice Edelman reinforced the commonsensical approach that documents ‘created or received officially and retained institutionally’ should be considered ‘official documents’ under the Archives Act:

The fact that something is created or received by a public officer in the course of performance of public duties is a powerful indicator that … the Commonwealth institution has a property right in that thing. But documents are commonly created or received in the course of performance of public duties where the creation or receipt is entirely personal and not institutional. Examples are preliminary working papers, personal notes or drafts of a final product created by judges, Ministers, Senators or the Governor-General. (Edelman J, concurring)

Official documents are the property of the relevant department, even if they are temporarily in the custody of a minister, who is therefore responsible for ensuring that they are returned to the relevant department after they leave office (and are not sent to a self-storage centre in Alexandria).

Dedicated research centres in Australia

In the 1990s and 2000s, the imagined Australian ‘equivalent’ of presidential libraries became an increasing reality with the rise of prime ministerial libraries, a confounding addition to the archival landscape.⁵⁰ For some, this has been a welcome addition to the national project of record keeping and historical research in the ‘public interest’; for others, it signals the (unwelcome) encroachment of American practices into Australian political culture.⁵¹ Since the late 1980s, prime ministerial libraries have been established on the campuses of Australian universities in honour of Deakin, Curtin, Menzies, Whitlam, Fraser, Hawke and Howard. However, by and large, these institutions do not hold much in the way of official records. The Bob Hawke Prime Ministerial Library, housed at the University of South Australia, Adelaide, holds some ‘private papers’ transferred from the NAA to the new institution in 1997, but the bulk of its holdings contain personal papers from Hawke’s career at the Australian Council of Trade Unions, his work as the member for Wills and his post-political life.⁵² By way of contrast, Cabinet minutes and submissions, official correspondence and departmental briefings, among other things, remain at the NAA.⁵³

The John Howard Prime Ministerial Library is, in this respect, unusual. It combines official material that it stores on behalf of the NAA; personal material of Howard that he donated to either the NAA or the library; and personal material of other people of interest from the Howard government, including other ministers (e.g. Tim Fischer and David Kemp) and political staff in Howard’s office (e.g. Tony O’Leary and John Perrin). In late 2018, the Morrison government allocated A$13.5 million to augment the University of New South Wales’s investment in the project,⁵⁴ but no federal funding was provided to any university, library or research centre for a Labor prime minister. This contrasts to Prime Minister Howard who, in 2000, refused to provide funding to either the Hawke Library or to the University of Melbourne to establish a Menzies Library, arguing that adequate funding had been provided to the NAA to maintain prime ministerial records.

The danger these research centres represent is the further privatisation of the archival record, with the temptation to treat increasing numbers of documents as ‘private’ to enhance the significance of eponymous research centres. As Piggott noted, ‘much about a society can be revealed by the mode it adopts to memorialise and remember its political leaders’.⁵⁵ The previous norm of having such records kept by the NAA need not be seen as a ‘failure’ to establish dedicated research centres, but an active reflection of the ‘first among equals’ nature of prime ministers. The rise of prime ministerial libraries reflects a systemic privileging of prime ministerial power in the public imagination of politics. Such institutions share a cultural landscape with other forms of remembrance—high-profile political memoirs, exclusive television interviews, dramatic or hagiographic documentaries and even the occasional biopic film—that refract policy debates and political events through the prism of individual leadership.⁵⁶

Most of these institutions, such as the Hawke Prime Ministerial Library, are exceptionally responsive and earnest in their efforts to aid the larger project of political and historical inquiry. But, when it comes to institutions such as these, significant discretionary power is left to the depositor and the institution, and comparatively little to the researcher. This also means that the records of individual prime ministers (including prime ministers Hawke, Fraser, Howard and Menzies) are now split across multiple institutions, creating difficulties and risks for researchers who may not realise they are only consulting a partial collection.⁵⁷ An official and comprehensive research guide, such as those pertaining to Fraser’s and Hawke’s papers, is the best insurance against partial research, but there is often a long lag between the separation of papers and the availability of a comprehensive archival guide.⁵⁸

Discussion

This article has shown that the collecting and maintaining of records of former prime ministers of Australia is inconsistent, ad hoc and discretionary. Consequently, current processes can result in severe restrictions on access to key documents in our history, and in the creation of ‘private’ humanities archives rather than the ‘public humanities’ that this volume seeks to explore and promote. As outlined above, the Hocking case should encourage us, as researchers, scholars and practitioners, to confront directly how we want papers of former (prime) ministers to be managed.

Clearly, individuals should have discretion over the management of their papers that are genuinely personal, such as family letters and photos and papers from pre-political careers. This can include restrictions on access to protect their family. It would be a retrograde step to inadvertently disincentivise individuals from donating papers. However, there are a range of steps that the NAA could take to improve transparency on these matters.

We still have not yet met the call from Piggott in 2005 to ‘get the framework right’.⁵⁹ The main challenge is creating a consistent structure and process to ensure the retention of papers of former prime ministers, including confirming the division between ‘official’ and ‘private’. This will help to prevent key papers not being transferred to the NAA, being subject to longer closure periods or being subject to stricter access conditions. The uncertainty around the status of papers of former ministers was considered in 1998 by the Australian Law Reform Commission in Australia’s Federal Record: A Review of Archives Act 1983. The commissioners expressed concern that:

the present Act does not make specific provision for the records of former ministers … The official records of ministers are a significant element in Commonwealth recordkeeping. They should be defined clearly as Commonwealth records.

The commissioners recommended that ‘the legislation should provide that any records created or received by ministers in the course of undertaking their ministerial responsibilities are Commonwealth records’.⁶⁰ Unfortunately, that recommendation has never been implemented. This change, particularly in the wake of Hocking, would help to ensure that these records remain in public custody, and for the use of researchers into the future.

Second, clearer direction is required to preserve documents generated by ministerial advisers. Advisers have grown in number and in influence over a period of decades,⁶¹ and ownership of the material they create in the course of their duties requires finer regulation than has been the case thus far. The Archives Act requires ministerial staff to refrain from destroying or removing documents provided to them by the relevant department. However, it is unclear whether the Archives Act would cover documents that were created within the ministerial office, which were never registered in the filing systems of the department. A significant volume of papers from Howard’s advisers has been deposited in the NAA and in the John Howard Prime Ministerial Library, and Hawke’s former economic adviser Ross Garnaut has submitted his papers to the NAA. However, it is unclear whether advisers to other prime ministers have similarly provided their papers to the NAA, or if they have been destroyed or retained privately.

Third, where there are bespoke access restrictions, the NAA should include these details in the relevant RecordSearch entry, so that researchers know that the records exist and understand what barriers there may be to accessing them. While there are often legitimate reasons for restricting access to genuinely private records, there is no legitimate reason to hide their very existence.

Finally, as noted above, the Archives Act currently does not have any rules on access requirements that donors can place on their papers. This differs from the NLA, whose Act explicitly requires that their collection be managed in ‘the national interest’.⁶² Consideration should be given to similar amendments to the Archives Act to ensure that ‘the national interest’ in public access is considered prior to any donation being finalised. Undue restrictions ought not to be allowable under legislation that promises to ‘encourage, facilitate, publicise and sponsor the use of archival material’.⁶³ There is something inherently undemocratic about the stipulation that only those of ‘established professional standing and reputation’ may access documents that shed light on the national past.

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1. 1 The authors thank the editors of this issue, the two anonymous peer reviewers and Katrin Travouillon, for reading and commenting on this work.

2. 2 Fergus Hunter, ‘“A Culture of Secrecy”: What Is the Right to Know Campaign about?’, Sydney Morning Herald, 21 October 2019, www.smh.com.au/national/a-culture-of-secrecy-what-is-the-right-to-know-campaign-about-20191018-p5323v.html.

3. 3 Australian Society of Archivists, quoted in David Tune, Functional and Efficiency Review of the National Archives of Australia, 30 January 2020, 81, www.ag.gov.au/sites/default/files/2021-03/functional-efficiency-review-national-archives-of-australia.PDF.

4. 4 Archives Act, 1983, section 3(2).

5. 5 ‘“Top Secret” Documents Found in Old Filing Cabinets in Canberra’, SBS News, 31 January 2018, www.sbs.com.au/news/article/top-secret-documents-found-in-old-filing-cabinets-in-canberra/u14a85jbf.

6. 6 A note on terminology: in this article, we adopt the terminology from the NAA’s Personal Records Collection framework, which states that:

   Personal records collections: Records of a person who is, or has been, associated with the Commonwealth (e.g. prime ministers, ministers or judges). These records are not maintained in the recordkeeping systems of an Australian Government agency or organisation. Personal records collections held by National Archives may include official Commonwealth records as well as private records. These records are accumulated by an individual, as distinct from records accumulated by an agency.

   As such, a ‘personal record’ is a record maintained by an individual, rather than an institution, and may be either ‘private’ or ‘official’. The fact that a record is ‘personal’ does not necessarily mean it isn’t ‘official’.

7. 7 Hocking v. Director-General of the National Archives of Australia [2020] HCA 19, S262/2019, para. 64, www.hcourt.gov.au/cases/case_s262-2019.

8. 8 See, for example, Robert Tickner, ‘The Challenges and Rewards of Political Memoir Writing’, Australian Journal of Biography and History 5 (2021): 179–80, doi.org/10.22459/AJBH.05.2021.08.

9. 9 Ibid., 179.

10. 10 Gideon Haigh, ‘The Rise and Rise of the Prime Minister’, Meanjin 72, no. 1 (2013): 45.

11. 11 Graeme Powell, ‘The First in the Field: Prime Ministers’ Papers in The National Library of Australia’, Australian Academic & Research Libraries 36, no. 1 (2005): 58, doi.org/10.1080/00048623.2005.10755292.

12. 12 Patrick Mullins, ‘“None of You Will Believe It”: Control, Truth and Myth in the Life of Billy McMahon’, Australian Journal of Biography and History 5 (2021): 149–54, doi.org/10.22459/AJBH.05.2021.07.

13. 13 Ibid., 151–2.

14. 14 Jack Waterford, ‘Archives Now Set Firmly on Statutory Base’, Canberra Times, 8 July 1984, 7. See also Daniel Casey, ‘Accessing Documents of Former Ministers—Plugging the Accountability Gap’, Public Law Review 33, no. 2 (2022): 91–6.

15. 15 Neale, quoted in Hocking, para. 64.

16. 16 Jenny Hocking, The Palace Letters (Brunswick: Scribe, 2020), 38.

17. 17 Barry Cohen, quoted in Parliamentary Debates, House of Representatives Hansard, 18 October 1983, 1874.

18. 18 National Archives of Australia, ‘Information and Records Management for Senators and MPs’, accessed 29 December 2023, www.naa.gov.au/information-management/records-authorities/types-records-authorities/general-records-authority-38/information-and-records-management-senators-and-mps.

19. 19 John Edwards, Keating: The Inside Story (Ringwood: Viking, 1996), xii.

20. 20 ‘Documents Lost in Blaze’, Daily Telegraph, 22 February 2003, 4.

21. 21 NAA: Freedom of Information [hereafter FOI] request 148, document 6, requested by one of the authors.

22. 22 Frank Leverett, interview by Daniel Casey, 11 April 2022.

23. 23 NAA: FOI request 157, part 1, document 9, requested by one of the authors.

24. 24 Casey, ‘Accessing Documents of Former Ministers’.

25. 25 Commonwealth, Senate, Legal and Constitutional Affairs Legislation Committee, 2018–19 Supplementary Budget Estimates, 23 October 2018, 134–5, www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Senate_estimates/legcon/2018-19_Supplementary_Budget_Estimates.

26. 26 NAA: FOI request 157, part 4, document 58.

27. 27 Ibid., document 6.

28. 28 Ibid.

29. 29 There is a separate discussion to be had about whether certain record keeping obligations should be extended to all members of parliament.

30. 30 NAA: M4326, 989, Ministerial Correspondence of John Howard as Prime Minister, 7 February 2000.

31. 31 NAA: M4898, 10, Alpha Correspondence–H–July 1998 to September 1998, Correspondence Maintained by the Prime Minister’s Principal Private Secretary.

32. 32 Ibid.

33. 33 Commonwealth, Parliament, Standing Committee on Education and the Arts, Transcript of Evidence on the Archives Bill 1978, 42–3.

34. 34 Hocking, para. 260.

35. 35 Hocking, Palace Letters, 44–5.

36. 36 NAA: FOI request 148, document 5.

37. 37 Ibid.

38. 38 See NAA: M3987 and M5582 (RecordSearch, accessed 10 October 2022).

39. 39 Commonwealth, Senate, Standing Committee on Legal and Constitutional Affairs, 2021–22 Budget Estimates, 27 May 2021, 173, www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Senate_estimates/legcon/2021-22_Budget_estimates.

40. 40 Jack Waterford, ‘Archives Strained by Access Calls’, Canberra Times, 27 November 1985, 8.

41. 41 National Archives of Australia, Annual Report 2021–22 (Canberra: NAA, 2022), www.naa.gov.au/sites/default/files/2022-10/NAA-annual-report-2021-22_1.pdf.

42. 42 NAA: FOI request 157, part 4, document 51.

43. 43 Ann Laura Stoler, ‘Colonial Archives and the Arts of Governance: On the Content in the Form’, Archival Science 2 (2002): 91, doi.org/10.1007/BF02435632.

44. 44 National Archives of Australia, ‘Acquisition Policy: Official and Private Record Collections (June 2016)’, accessed 2 April 2018, naa.gov.au/Images/PersonalRecordsAcquisitionPolicy20160610_tcm16-100897.pdf (site discontinued).

45. 45 Ibid.

46. 46 I. S. Lustick, ‘History, Historiography, and Political Science: Multiple Historical Records and the Problem of Selection Bias’, American Political Science Review 90, no. 3 (1996): 605–18, doi.org/10.2307/2082612.

47. 47 Melanie Nolan, ‘The Great Individual in History: Historicising Historians’ Biographical Practice’, in Fear of Theory: Towards a New Theoretical Justification of Biography, ed. Hans Renders and David Veltman (Leiden: Brill, 2021), 77, doi.org/10.1163/9789004498891_007.

48. 48 See Melanie Nolan, Biography: An Historiography (London: Routledge, 2023), ch. 2.

49. 49 Blair Williams, ‘Where Are the Great Women? A Feminist Analysis of Australian Political Biographies’, Australian Journal of Biography and History 5 (2021): 26, doi.org/10.22459/AJBH.05.2021.02.

50. 50 Michael Piggott, ‘Australian Prime Ministerial Libraries—Comments and Reflections’, Australian Academic & Research Libraries 36, no. 1 (2005): 74–83, doi.org/10.1080/00048623.2005.10755294.

51. 51 Troy Bramston, ‘PM Libraries to Hold the Minutiae and Momentous’, Australian, 8 January 2019, 10; Haigh, ‘Rise of the Prime Minister’, 42.

52. 52 Alan Bundy, ‘For Someone Special: The Development of the Bob Hawke Prime Ministerial Library’, Australian Academic & Research Libraries 36, no. 1 (2005): 19, doi.org/10.1080/00048623.2005.10755288; ‘Guide to the Bob Hawke Collection’, University of South Australia Library, accessed 13 November 2023, guides.library.unisa.edu.au/specialandarchivalcollections/hawke.

53. 53 See Paul Dalgleish, Bob Hawke: A Guide to Archives of Australia’s Prime Ministers (Canberra: National Archives of Australia, 2021).

54. 54 Australian Government, Mid-Year Economic and Fiscal Outlook, 2018–19, December 2018, 168, archive.budget.gov.au/2018-19/myefo/myefo_2018-19.pdf.

55. 55 Piggott, ‘Australian Prime Ministerial Libraries’, 74.

56. 56 See, for example, Joshua Black, ‘A Life Triumphantly Well Written: Producing the Hawke Legacy, 1979–2019’, ANUHJ II 2 (2020): 81–106, doi.org/10.22459/ANUHJII.2020.05.

57. 57 Daniel Casey, ‘Book Review: Dear Prime Minister: Letters to Robert Menzies 1949–1966’, Australian Journal of Politics and History 67, no. 3–4 (2021): 533–4, doi.org/10.1111/ajph.12794.

58. 58 Elizabeth Masters and Katie Wood, Malcolm Fraser: Guide to Archives of Australia’s Prime Ministers (Canberra: National Archives of Australia and University of Melbourne Archives, 2012); Dalgleish, Hawke: Guide to Archives.

59. 59 Piggott, ‘Australian Prime Ministerial Libraries’, 78.

60. 60 Australian Law Reform Commission, Australia’s Federal Record: A Review of Archives Act 1983 (Canberra: Commonwealth of Australia, 1985), 11.26, 11.30, recommendation 67.

61. 61 M. Maley, ‘Too Many or Too Few? The Increase in Federal Ministerial Advisers, 1972–1999’, Australian Journal of Public Administration 59, no. 4 (2000): 48–53, doi.org/10.1111/1467-8500.00180; Anne Tiernan, Power without Responsibility: Ministerial Staffers in Australian Governments from Whitlam to Howard (Sydney: UNSW Press, 2007).

62. 62 National Library Act, 1960, s6(b).

63. 63 Archives Act, 1983, s5(h).