Citizenship and Government - Projects

Retrieving the record: the White Australia policy, citizenship education and new applications for archival research

Denise Meredyth and Julian Thomas, with Klaus Neumann

ARC Linkage grant (2003–06)

Retrieving the Record is a joint research project with the National Archives of Australia (NAA). Funded by a Linkage grant from the Australian Research Council, it draws on the work of Klaus Neumann, Denise Meredyth and Dinah Partridge, in collaboration with Margaret Kenna of the NAA. The project partners aim to develop and demonstrate new conceptual avenues for the use of primary historical records in secondary classrooms, and to evaluate them in terms of their potential for civics and citizenship education.

The project focuses on Australian immigration policies and their implementation between 1945 and 1973, particularly the evolution of the White Australia policy and its administration. A book and articles about restrictive immigration in postwar Australia will result from the project, as will articles on the use of archival resources in the teaching of history and citizenship. The NAA is also building on the project to develop an exhibition and an interactive website, which will offer educationists several modules based on immigration case studies.

The interactive website will be hosted by the NAA. It will encourage teachers and students to draw on primary sources to discover how Australian immigration policies were formulated, how they were implemented and how they affected the lives of individuals and communities. The website will introduce teachers and students to the use of online archival resources. It will also facilitate intellectual exchanges among groups of teachers and students, and foster collaborative projects across states. Supplementary research will investigate prospects for making stronger institutional connections between the Archives, citizenship education and teachers' professional formation. Like other archives, museums and national collection agencies, the NAA has a role in public education and civic formation. It also has a place in the developing national network of online education and lifelong learning. Our research will provide a context for understanding how people, in schools, at home and in other settings, make use of online learning resources. What is the most effective way to combine information-seeking with problem-solving and critical historical investigation?

Workshop for Victorian teachers

In December 2003, the project team hosted a workshop for Victorian teachers and history/SOSE curriculum experts, at the state archives office, Casselden Place. This was an opportunity to talk with teachers about whether and how the national archives could be a useful resource for VCE teaching, to discuss how both teachers and students currently use online learning resources, to outline the ideas behind the Retrieving the Record project and to discuss models for developing an online learning module based on archival materials.

Klaus Neumann outlined features of a planned interactive website using case studies of real people who had sought to emigrate to Australia from Mauritius between the late 1940s and the early 1970s. Subsequent discussion gave rise to various suggestions about ways in which the materials and pedagogic strategy could be adapted to classroom uses, at different levels. New partnerships between the NAA and Victorian educators emerged from the session.

Mauritian immigration case study

Currently we are working on a pilot module about the immigration of Mauritians to Australia between the late 1940s and the early 1970s. It will feature thousands of digitised archival documents about the immigration of Mauritians, about Australia's so-called mixed descent policy (which was part of the White Australia policy), and about Australian–Mauritian relations. Most of the files and documents used in the module are from the National Archives collection. The module will also provide access to a select number of documents and images held in other archives, and in libraries and private collections. We expect this module to be available online by mid-2004.

Australian Historians Association conference –History on the Web sessions

In recent years, archives and libraries have made documents and manuscripts from their collections available to researchers and members of the general public by digitising them. While some of them, such as the Public Record Office, make users pay for the right to access digitised files, others, such as the National Archives of Australia, offer this service free of charge and put digitised historical sources on the web.

The increasing use of digitisation will revolutionise the way history is researched and taught, and change the public's view of the role of the historian as the expert best equipped to fashion histories from unpublished sources. Let us imagine a situation in which the public had unlimited access to the relevant holdings of the Tasmanian State Archives–would that not radically change the nature of the so-called history wars?

These issues were explored in a workshop at the Australian Historians Association conference in Newcastle, 2004.

Session 1

This session explored some of the practical and theoretical implications of digitisation.

In "The Democratisation of History", Klaus Neumann introduced relevant issues by discussing two websites he wrote for the National Archives. A Doubtful Character is the first instalment in the series Uncommon Lives, which features the biographies of famous and not-so-famous Australians. Drawing extensively on documents and images from the Archives' collection, the website retraces the life of the inventor Wolf Klaphake. The second, and more ambitious, website is "Mauritians and the White Australia Policy", a direct outcome of the Retrieving the Record project. It allows secondary students to research aspects of the immigration of Mauritians to Australia by providing them with direct access to a variety of digitised historical sources. In his paper Klaus Neumann explored how non-historians' access to extensive archives of historical sources (rather than to carefully selected key documents) might change the way we think about history and about the task of the historian.

In "Challenging Lyotard: Digital History and Its Potential", Jonathan Carter (English Department, University of Melbourne) was concerned with the epistemological implications of digitisation. Lyotard famously argued that postmodernism entails a transformation in the conditions of knowledge production and reception. For him, digitisation meant no simple gain but the potential loss of outmoded epistemic practices and perceptions. Jonathan investigated the validity of that claim with reference to recent developments in online history.

Tikka Wilson works as a website developer for the National Archives of Australia. Her paper, "Making Public Persons Public: Australia's Prime Ministers" charted the development of the National Archives first specialised website featuring an extensive collection of digitised documents. Australia's Prime Ministers is a "shop window" of information about Australia's 25 prime ministers, which allows users to access digitised documents held by the National Archives and other Australian libraries and archives. While Tikka's paper was mainly concerned with the practicalities of digitisation, she also discussed how it will affect the work of government archives in the future.

Session 2

This session was more specifically concerned with the use of digitised historical documents in secondary and tertiary teaching. A panel of seven discussed the potential of digitisation in the classroom and in curriculum development.