Indigenous archival records at risk.

It seems as a nation we have grown so used to government dishonesty and injustice that we just shrug our collective shoulders. Our government indefinitely imprisons women and children known to have committed no crime, and it continues to promote an international invasion whose justification has proved to be false. But the bulk of the population don't seem to care, happily sedated by the scandals of people who earn millions role-playing for TV and film, or the scandals of the non-people whose roles they play, or perhaps the latest cricketing crisis about 15 degrees of separation.

There are of course many who are deeply disturbed by the lies and injustices perpetrated by governments in our names. Our voices might not reverse this mendacity but we can proclaim a refusal to play along with the con. We can say, for what it's worth, not in my name. There is always a choice, having learned the facts, not to be duped by the rhetoric.

During the last decade an issue has been slowly emerging out of the archival depths. The media, with its sophisticated sense of the public interest, has flicked it a glance and declared it a non-event, nothing new, old history. Governments, as we shall see, are more than happy with that classification. The issue--which has ramifications far wider than its financial focus--has become known as the Stolen Wages, a term that encompasses Aboriginal wages and other entitlements commandeered by governments during most of the twentieth century. This chapter is about my involvement in the fight for Stolen Wages, the practicalities of research and the implications for action, and how that might relate to archives and records management.

I started university as a mature-age student intending to feed my appetite for knowledge. Griffith University in Queensland was still young in the mid 1980s and there were no courses on Australian history or race relations. But for a number of reasons, mostly centered on my fascination with the forensic inquiries of French philosopher Michel Foucault and his theories of power, I chose as my PhD project the administration of Aboriginal Queenslanders--a topic I knew nothing about. I wanted to look at the machinery of power: what drove it, what sustained it, who wrote the manuals, who tinkered with it, how did modifications impact on older working parts, did the machinery do what they said it was doing; that sort of thing. I wanted to stand inside the bureaucracy and write about who did what and why, and measure the internal workings against the external rhetoric. To do this, of course, I had to read the records. And so began my 'other' life.

The main problem for an outsider in accessing records is that you have to know what to ask for. And if you're doing a sweeping investigation of a new field this includes just about everything. When I finally got access to restricted government records in February 1991, Queensland State Archives was in a highly nervous state. One year earlier, in sensational circumstances, the state archivist had been party to destruction of official records at the request of the Goss Labor government, records which apparently were also sought in relation to legal claims. (1) The fall-out was intense, and still festers.

So the prospect of a PhD student beavering away through dozens of sensitive files triggered alarm bells. Who would know if there was material I shouldn't see? To protect the archivist's professional integrity, someone in authority would have to vet every file before I saw it and his/her costs would not come out of Archives' budget. An additional difficulty for me was the time constraints on Archives' staff producing hundreds of files on request and photocopying where required. On the other hand I had the option of a desk and a photocopier in the department's city office. If my requests for particular files were lodged…