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Documenting Australian Society: An initiative of the UNESCO Australian Memory of the World Committee

  • Adrian Cunningham

    UNESCO Australian Memory of the World Committee

  • Correspondence to

    Adrian Cunningham, Email: 

  • Volume 1, Number 1, Article ID 1, December 2024.
    International Journal of Documentary Heritage 2024;1(1):1. https://doi.org/10.71278/IJODH.2024.1.1.1
    Received on October 02, 2024, Revised on Novemver 20, 2024, Accepted on December 05, 2024, Published on December 30, 2024.
Copyright © 2024 International Centre for Documentary Heritage under the auspices of UNESCO.
This is an Open Access article which is freely available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-ND) (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).

Abstract

The topic of documenting Australian Society has been discussed regularly by Australian documentary heritage professionals since the 1990s. The journal Archives and Manuscripts has published theme issues on the topic in 2001 and in 2023. In 2018 the UNESCO Australian Memory of the World Program organised a national summit on the topic in Canberra. That summit meeting endorsed ‘The Canberra Declaration’ as an action agenda for the documentary heritage sectors and agreed that the UNESCO Australian Memory of the World Program should take carriage of the initiative. Since then, a steering committee has been established and three seminars/webinars have been organised. The first seminar was on Documenting Covid-19 in Australia, the second on Documenting the Experiences of Australian on Welfare and the third on reinventing archival appraisal practices. This paper discusses the background and objectives of the initiative, examples of similar initiatives in other countries, the current status of the initiative and plans for the future.

Keywords

Document Selection, Under-documentation, Australia, ‘The Canberra Declaration’

Defining the problem

At present in Australia, documentary heritage1 holdings are built with limited self-awareness of the greater whole. Decisions about what material should be preserved long-term can be reactive and uncoordinated. What are the consequences of this lack of coordination? What picture does the total stock of Australian documentary heritage present? How representative is it in terms of Australia’s rich, distinctive and diverse historical experiences, its changing population, localities and multiple national narratives? Is Australia making the best use of the limited resources that are devoted to the cause of preserving and providing access to documentary memory? Australia needs an agreed, transparent and defensible process for making hard decisions about what documentation to make and keep.

A vast quantity of documentation is created and destroyed every year in Australia. With the advent of digital technologies, the world now creates more data every year than it has the physical capacity to store and keep. Only a tiny sliver of this vastness is able to be preserved for use by future generations. We accept that only a tiny sliver is worth the effort and expense of preserving. But what documentation needs to be included in this sliver? Are there wasteful overlaps and concentrations? Are there gaps and silences? Are we keeping the right stuff? Are there time periods, issues, communities, minorities and phenomena which urgently need targeted documentation strategies? Are there important aspects of life in Australia for which adequate documentation isn’t created in the first place and which need to be proactively documented before all memory of those activities disappears forever? In short, what documentation does Australia really need to make and keep to enable current and future generations to understand, explain, debate and account for our national collective experiences?

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