A short distance away Robert Gordon Menzies is telling us how the mining of uranium at Rum Jungle will contribute to world safety.
It was a white Australia. A fawning Australia. A paranoid Australia. And a land of full employment and promise. It can be seen in a splendid exhibition called “”Within Living Memory” by Australian Archives at Parliament House until December 20.
The pictures are a drawcard. They are there to attract attention to the gems in the documents beneath. But you can’t have an exhibition of boring old documents.
There is Barry Humphries’ 1960 application for a literary grant. Among his qualifications is an ABC travel series from the perspective of an Australian housewife.
The display includes the original of the ANZUS treaty signed by Percy Spender, John Foster Dulles and an illegible New Zealander. It was an age of menace. The communists were everywhere. Archival material on display shows hand-written amendments to the Communist Party Dissolution Bill trying to widen the definition of “”communist”, trying, no doubt, to catch all that were under the bed.
There was menace elsewhere, too. From America, no less. It was revealed in a 1956 letter from “”the Mother’s Union” of St John’s Church in Moss Vale to “”G. Bate, MLA”. (In fact he was Jeff, short for Jefferson, Bate, a Member of the House of Representatives.) The letter said they would “”like to add our voice in protest of the proposed visit of Mr Elvis Presley to Australia as we regard his performance and conduct a direct menace to our young people and an added burden to their parents”.
Even in 1956, before the menace of television came to Australia, they were misplacing apostrophes and misusing prepositions.
Speaking of menaces, the only Federal Royal Commissions in the whole decade were into espionage and television.
Petrov’s application for asylum is displayed next to urgent telegrams to the Prime Minister to have the plane carrying Mrs Petrov to the Soviet Union stopped at Darwin.
Ken Rosewall is pictured in 1953 with a wooden racket. Bondi Beach is clean. Dawn Fraser and Murray Rose look fresh, wet and confident. There is no paranoia here.
Menzies gazes up in mystic worship at the young Queen leaving our (or should I say her) shores in 1954.
The Snowy Mountains scheme confidently redirects the continent’s water. There is no fawning here. But the Ord falters.
Sydney with trams; what a bitter public-transport bungle to tear up the track.
Some 1990s Asian visitors look at bizarre poster encouraging migrants to come to Australia. Australia looks like Switzerland. Some secret files show Australian Government complicity in the child immigration scheme. Populate or perish.
The Government is also orchestrating the assimilation program. Assimilation is “”the only possible future” for Australian Aborigines, writes Paul Hasluck the Minister for Territories. Yet, what is this, Albert Namatjira is denied the right to build on a block of land in Alice Springs. Then he is an honorary white man after death as officials take their chairs at a ceremony to open a memorial to him, while Aborigines in the background sit on the ground. Letters of protest from half-castes demanding citizenship are displayed along with documentary evidence of their success. Black consciousness was not a 60s and 70s phenomenon. Other letters wonder why Namatjira had to pay tax yet could not vote.
“”We are not here to tell a story,” says Colin Webb, who heads the preservation services of the ACT office of Australian Archives. “”We are just presenting the documents.”
Clearly, the documents and photographs tell their own story.
And there’s Doc Evatt signing the original GATT treaty. (The wheel turns and yet is forever still.)
Union Jacks drape proudly at the opening of a motel site in a Canberra Paddock, and it is 1955.
Australian Archives has two million pictures. Most are defence and aerials, but that still leaves an enormous collection on Australian life. Gabrielle Hyslop, who is in charge of reference services, delights in the details and the background. The assumptions of the photographers are as important as the main subject.
Visitors to the exhibition can touch a computer screen menu to bring up a further 540 photographs on screen, sorted into categories of home, work, recreation etc.
Mr Webb tells how some of the colour pictures are fading fast. Australian Archives is freezing them, literally. They take copies and freeze the originals. The originals can be unfrozen to take more copies, so the original will stay preserved.
The exhibition is an appetite whetter. Australian Archives is not merely a storer of musty official documents. It stores Australian life. In total it has 80 shelf kilometres of documents, most available for public inspection. Its offices in Mitchell are open to the public weekdays 9am to 4.30pm and from 9am to 9pm on Tuesdays.