This is the published version of my chapter ‘Asking better questions: History, Trove and the risks that count’ in the book CopyFight, edited by Phillipa McGuiness. It’s reproduced here with the permission of the publishers.

You can buy a copy of the book from NewSouth Press or just about any bookstore. You can also download a pdf version of this chapter.

A few years ago historian Kate Bagnall and I created ‘The real face of White Australia’. In 1901 the Immigration Restriction Act gave legislative force to a system of racial exclusion and control that came to be known as the White Australia Policy. The bureaucratic remnants of this system survive today in the National Archives of Australia. But how can we find them? How can we see them? Our online experiment brings some of these lives, previously deemed out of place in a ‘white’ Australia, to the surface. Instead of documents, files or search results, all you see are faces – a continuous, scrolling wall displaying thousands of faces. It’s compelling, challenging and discomfiting. Some viewers were brought to tears.

The faces come from portrait photographs that were attached to official certificates. If non-white residents wanted to travel overseas, they needed special identity documents. Without them they could be refused entry on their return. They would not be allowed to come home. On the front of each certificate are photographs and basic biographical details, on the back is a palm print. Many thousands of these documents are preserved in the archives.

To extract the faces I reverse-engineered the National Archives’ online database to automatically harvest images of the documents. From just one series or group of records, I downloaded more than 12,000 images. Then I tinkered with some facial detection code until I was able to find and crop out the portraits. I ended up with 7000 faces – just a sample of the archives’ holdings, but enough.

The whole thing was a quick experiment, mostly completed over the space of a weekend, but its influence has been widely felt. The project has been cited in discussions around race, archives, visualisation and serendipitous discovery. It has been assigned for student reflection in university courses around the world and is regularly held up as an example of what the digital humanities has to offer. But whenever I give a talk about it in Australia, one question seems inevitably to arise – what is the copyright status of the images?

In a keynote address to New Zealand’s National Digital Forum in 2011, library technologist Michael Lascarides challenged those of us who work with digital cultural collections to ‘ask better questions’. When confronted with the remains of our racist history, when looking into the eyes of people whose lives were monitored and controlled by the government because of the colour of their skin, why should we feel compelled to consider the technicalities of copyright?

Surely there are better questions to ask?

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I describe myself as a cultural data-hacker, but my business hours are currently spent on the other side of the fence, as the manager of Trove at the National Library of Australia.Trove is a discovery service that makes Australian resources easier to find and use. It’s a collection of collections, bringing together the holdings of many libraries, archives, museums, universities, government agencies and more. The most heavily used part of Trove is an ever-growing collection of digitised newspapers – the full text of more than 130 million articles documenting Australian history from 1803 onwards.

It’s hard to measure the cultural impact of Trove’s digitised newspapers. Technologies like optical character recognition (OCR) and keyword searching are now commonplace, but apply them to 150 years of Australian history and something transformative happens. Easy access to historical newspapers is changing our relationship with the past.

It’s not just about convenience – the ability to do your research at home in your pyjamas – although the significance of opening access to rural and remote communities across a large country like Australia shouldn’t be underestimated. It’s also about using the granularity of newspapers to expose the local, the particular, the personal and the ephemeral – glimpses of ordinary lives otherwise unrecorded.

Kate is a historian of Chinese Australia, interested in intimate relationships between Chinese men and white women. The people she studies often lived at the fringes of society and their lives can be difficult to recover. But searching across digitised newspapers she can find shards and fragments, stories of love and loss, full of the vivid, turbulent detail of everyday life. Each shard helps to build a bigger picture, a different view of Australian society and history.

Other researchers have mined the newspapers in pursuit of topics as diverse as invasive species, climate change, poetry and legal history. These uses will multiply as the corpus grows and our tools develop. Like a big telescope or a particle accelerator, digitised newspapers support large-scale fundamental research across a range of disciplines. Old papers have become a site for the creation of new knowledge.

But digitised newspapers are not solely the province of professional researchers. The size and diversity of their content support almost any interest, feed almost any passion. I recently harvested a sample of articles from the web that include links to Trove’s newspapers – 3116 webpages containing 13,389 links. We know that family and local historians make heavy use of the newspapers and their efforts are well represented in my sample. But there was more – sport, war, science, politics, architecture, music, art… from popular entertainment to academic treatises, from hateful diatribes to thoughtful reflections, they were all there.

More surprising than just the range of topics, styles and prejudices is the different ways the newspapers are used online. In 2013, for example, the local media in Western Australia reported on Cockburn City Council’s plan to erect a shark barrier at Coogee Beach. When one councillor expressed doubts, noting the lack of ‘serious or fatal shark attacks at Coogee Beach since records commenced in the 1800s’, a reader could quickly challenge her comments by citing two Trove newspaper articles that documented local attacks. References to the digitised newspapers are embedded online not just within narratives or compilations, but as commentary and debate. Trove provides a ready source of evidence to test historical claims without lengthy research or the mediation of experts.

Easy accessibility is helping to break down the otherness of the past, allowing it to be mobilised in contemporary discussions. New conversations between past and present are emerging around the digitised newspapers. Trove has launched us upon a massive ongoing experiment in collaborative meaning-making.
And it might never have happened.

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Years before I was given the job as Trove manager, I was poking and prodding at the interface, trying to extract useful data to use in new applications, and generally making a nuisance of myself. Among the tools I created was QueryPic, a simple way of visualising newspaper searches. It’s been through several versions but the principle remains constant – just feed in your search query and QueryPic will create a line chart showing you the number of newspaper articles per year that match your query.

QueryPic is well used and has even been cited in scholarly articles, but I think its greatest value is as an example of what becomes possible when you make large quantities of cultural content available in digital form. Instead of the normal list of search results, QueryPic shows you trends and patterns. You can observe changes in language, the rise and fall of our cultural obsessions or the impact of major events. When did the ‘Great War’ become the ‘First World War’? Is that jolly Christmas visitor called ‘Father Christmas’ or ‘Santa Claus’? QueryPic helps you see things differently.

One of the most dramatic and unexpected patterns revealed by QueryPic is that Australian history ends in 1954. Who would have guessed? With very few exceptions, Trove’s collection of digitised newspapers comes to an abrupt halt in 1954, when the possibilities of the digital age meet the realities of copyright. You want to trace cultural patterns beyond 31 December 1954? Sorry, you’re out of luck.

Why 1954? We’re currently about halfway through the great AUSFTA culture drought. On 1 January 2005, the Australia–US Free Trade Agreement (AUSFTA) extended the standard period of copyright protection from fifty to seventy years and changed the way photographs are treated. We might have to wait until 2025 before Trove’s newspapers can start edging forward, year by year, beyond 1954.

But it’s even more complicated than that, as there’s no certainty that newspaper articles published before 1955 are out of copyright. To be sure, the National Library would have to investigate any named authors to confirm they all died before 1955. That’s simply impossible in a mass digitisation project. Instead the library weighed the copyright risks against the cultural benefit and decided to proceed. If the library had been more cautious, if the risks or uncertainties had seemed too great, Trove would have no digitised newspapers. And we would all be poorer.

These types of judgements are made all the time by cultural organisations wanting to open online access to their collections. Libraries, archives and museums are full of so-called ‘orphan’ works, whose creators cannot be identified or located. There’s no risk-free way of making this content available online.

But these risks are not only assessed and managed, they’re passed on to users, who must themselves try and navigate the thicket of copyright law. As use of online collections moves beyond traditional forms of citation into new types of digital aggregation, analysis and annotation, the doubts and complexities accumulate. The price of innovation is increased risk. The only safe course is to do nothing.

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Why do we put cultural heritage collections online? Is it for the sake of efficiency, preservation, marketing or perhaps an informed citizenry? Usually we fall back on fuzzy notions of ‘engagement’ or ‘access’. More access is good, particularly if we can measure it easily through web stats.

Recently we surveyed Trove users to gain a broad picture of satisfaction and use. One finding in particular keeps me coming into work each day – 90 per cent of our general users agreed with the statement ‘Trove has made me interested in learning and discovering more’. Access can’t simply be measured in collection images or web-page hits. What we’re creating is an enlarged space for reflection, research, learning, creativity and critique. We’re enabling people to do more, with more.

Trove is not alone. Around the world, projects such as Europeana, the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) and Digital New Zealand all work to open our collected cultural heritage to new forms of use. Europeana, in particular, has drawn on its research into the value and impact of online collections to proclaim a wonderfully ambitious agenda. Their aim is to ‘transform lives’ – to unlock Europe’s cultural heritage, enabling it to act as a ‘catalyst for social and economic change’.

Resisting Europeana’s efforts to ‘transform the world with culture’ are an array of different copyright regimes across Europe. Advocacy on behalf of the very idea of ‘openness’ is crucial to the success of their mission. But it’s never simply a matter of law.

Our cultural collections contain many resources that are already free of copyright restrictions, but it’s not always easy to find them. A lack of clear identification can stymie reuse as effectively as copyright restrictions – it’s not enough to share the resources, organisations also need to share licensing information so that open content can be easily discovered across collections. Sometimes institutional requirements for permission are weighed upon public domain resources, fostering doubt in place of certainty. Wherever copyright lingers, rights statements bloom in astonishing diversity. The DPLA estimates that there are more than 26,000 different rights statements attached to items in their aggregated collection. How are users expected to know what they’re allowed to do?

The complexity of copyright fosters confusion and uncertainty beyond the reach of mere law. It’s not just legislation that has to change.

Recently Dan Cohen, the Executive Director of the DPLA, argued that the licensing of cultural data should address more than just legal and technical issues. Instead of seeking to enforce acknowledgement of the source of the data through licence conditions, the DPLA wants to push discussion of attribution and reuse ‘into the social or ethical realm’ by ‘pairing a permissive license with a strong moral entreaty’. Instead of a statement about legal constraints, we have the opportunity for a conversation about what matters and why.

It might not figure in our web stats, but the National Library has plenty of anecdotal evidence that Trove changes lives – a grandfather’s face glimpsed for the first time, or perhaps a family mystery solved. One man, who grew up in care, found through Trove the only known photograph of himself as a child. How do we weigh such opportunities against questions of ownership and control?

We need to shift the discussion away from the nature of property to the value of use. What do we want to do? Online culture is read–write. We do not simply consume – we share, we remix, we curate and create. Increased participation brings new opportunities for understanding. Do we give them flight or lock them down?

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One of the main sources of traffic to Trove, up there with Facebook and Wikipedia, is the knitting site Ravelry. Why? Because Ravelry users have found and shared hundreds of craft patterns from Trove’s digitised newspapers. And not just shared, but made. The most popular pattern, ‘Elegant elephant’, discovered in a 1959 edition of the Australian Women’s Weekly, has been made more than forty times, often with individual embellishments.

This to me seems a great example of the wonderful complexities that the digitisation of cultural heritage collections are introducing into our relationship with the past. A digital version of a fifty-year-old pattern is shared online and spawns a herd of cuddly elephants. From past to present, from digital to physical, the transformations pile one on top of another.

It’s also unexpected. It’s not a use that was designed into the system, it’s a new set of experiences brought to life through the passions and ingenuity of Trove users.

The application of digital tools to large cultural collections also promises to surprise. Techniques drawn from computational linguistics, for example, are being used to analyse the spread of ideas through nineteenth-century newspapers. Another project is using computer vision to identify poems in newspapers through their distinctive shapes. New structures can be found and visualised within digitised sources. New questions can be asked.

But these techniques also carry new risks. Researchers in the digital humanities, exploring the application of technology to fields such as literature and history, have been prominent in discussions around the copyright implications of mass digitisation projects and the legal status of text-mining. Increased clarity around concepts such as ‘transformative use’ is necessary to ensure that researchers have access to data and the confidence to explore.

And yet the ultimate goal isn’t certainty, it’s a greater awareness of the constraints around our engagement with the past. Within both government and the cultural sector the value of ‘open’ data is rightly proclaimed, but open data is always, to some extent, closed. Categories have been assigned, formats have been cleaned, deci- sions made about what belongs and what doesn’t – every spreadsheet contains an argument.

Each elephant is different. The tensions imposed by our overly complex system of copyright do at least remind us that the past can never be ‘open’, its limits cannot be legislated, its boundaries cannot be fixed. Beneath questions of access and use are better questions about our responsibilities to the past.

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I’ll admit that part of my discomfort in being questioned about the copyright status of ‘The real face of White Australia’ stemmed from my ignorance. I just didn’t know the answer.

I’m still not sure.

I do know now that photographs taken before 1955 are okay. But these were attached to official forms, so perhaps the government owns the copyright. Are they published? I suspect the only way to be certain would be to seek permission from the current government department with responsibility for … what exactly? The White Australia Policy lives on, its workings preserved within the archives.

I’ll admit too that I always thought it would be interesting if some part of the government challenged our use of the documents. What exactly would they be claiming ownership of?

‘The real face of White Australia’ was motivated by a strong sense of responsibility towards those people whose lives are glimpsed through the records. To me the question of responsibility still seems more important than the intricacies of ownership. Our debts are to the people who confront us with their gaze, who defy the legislation that told them they did not belong.

Copyright law will never be able to make these judgements for us. No system can predict the individual ethical calculations that shape our engagement with the past. We may always be confronted with risks.

The word ‘access’ itself is full of politics. To what? By whom? When it comes to our cultural heritage we should never be satisfied. We must ask about the silences and the gaps. We must challenge the definitions. Access can never simply be given, to some extent it has to be taken. In the struggle we will find meaning.

There must always be risks. The point is to make the risks count.

Entering the web of data

[view the presentation…] [view the triples…]

Keynote delivered at the annual conference of the Australia and New Zealand Society of Indexers, 14 September 2011.

This is me.

Today, Wednesday, 14 September 2011, I’m honoured to be able to join you here in the luxurious surrounds of the Brighton Savoy Hotel for the ‘Indexing See Change‘ conference. This is an event, a moment in history; we can pinpoint ourselves, this gathering, both in time and in space.

If we do that, if we move outside the moment and position ourselves on a timeline or a map, interesting things start to happen. Connections emerge.

Here we are at number 150, The Esplanade, in Brighton. A bit over a kilometre away is the stately villa, Kamesburgh. For many years Kamesburgh was also known as the Anzac Hostel — a refuge for permanently-incapacitated World War One veterans.

The Anzac Hostel opened on 5 July 1919. Here it is draped in its patriotic finery, from the collections of the Australian War Memorial. According to the caption, the Anzac Hostel was ‘a home, not an institute’.

Also amongst the War Memorial’s holdings is a wheeled bed that was used at the hostel. This particular bed was apparently occupied by one man, Albert Ward, for forty-three years.

It was probably in a bed just like this that Alexander Dewar Kelley passed away on 27 January 1944. Alexander Kelley was cremated, and his remains interred amongst the roses at what is now called the Springvale Botanical Cemetery. Not far from my own grandparents.

Alexander Kelley spent close to half his life in the Anzac Hostel. Like many young men, he bravely answered his nation’s call to arms, but returned from war much changed. We can follow Alex’s war through his service record, easily-accessible through the website ‘Mapping Our Anzacs‘.

Alex was a coach painter who enlisted in the AIF in January 1916. Within a year he was in France. In May 1917 he suffered a gunshot wound to the head, but was able to rejoin his unit in August. Less than a month later though, he was wounded again, this time more severely. For Alex the war was over, and he was shipped back to Australia in May 1918.

‘Mapping Our Anzacs’ includes a scrapbook feature through which visitors to the site can attach notes or photographs to a service record. Amongst the the many thousands of postings is a fragment from a diary, found tucked inside the bible of Alexander Kelley’s mother. The diary entry reads simply: ‘Alex arrived from Front. Wet day. Saw him at “Caulfield”.’

Alex had survived and had returned to his family. This was a day to remember. But there was sadness too, for Alex was not the same young man who had left for the battlefields of Europe. In the diary fragment, ‘Caulfield’ is enclosed in inverted commas, indicating perhaps that the reunion took place, not in the suburb, but in the Caulfield rehabilitation hospital. Alexander Kelley was wounded in the face, hands and legs. He was left blind in both eyes and his right leg was amputated. He would live the remainder of his life a little over a kilometre away from here at the Anzac Hostel.

This is just one story. There are over 375,000 World War One service records held by the National Archives of Australia. How can we hope to understand a number like that? How can we hope to imagine the war’s impact on families, on communities?

‘Mapping Our Anzacs’ uses familiar Google maps to display the places of birth and enlistment recorded in many of those service records. But technical limitations make it impossible to display all the places at once. You can, however, take the same data and open it in Google Earth. If you then zoom in on Victoria, you see something like this.

Each marker represents a place where a service person was born or enlisted. It’s impossible to read, of course, but that’s the point. There is so little blank space. As you zoom further, more markers appear, more place names resolve. It’s simple, but it’s powerful. They came from everywhere. From the smallest village to the biggest city; nowhere was untouched.

The ‘Mapping Our Anzacs’ scrapbook offers another perspective. It’s possible to extract the images posted to the scrapbook and present them on a 3D wall. Amidst an assortment of memorabilia, there are faces. Not places, or records — this is a wall of people.

It’s worth noting too that like the markers on the maps, these faces link back to the actual service records. So they’re not just a new way of seeing the collection, they’re a new way of exploring it.

But the records don’t stand in isolation, they themselves have a context. A couple of years ago, Mitchell Whitelaw from the University of Canberra, undertook a project called ‘The Visible Archive‘ to investigate ways of visualising the holdings of the National Archives of Australia. Have you ever wondered what 360km worth of records looks like?

This represents the holdings of the National Archives. Files within the archives are organised into series, and each square in this image represents a single series — there are about 60,000 of them. Naturally the size of the square gives an indication of the size of the series itself. It’s a fascinating and strangely beautiful picture.

It’s easy enough to pick out the World War One service records — Series B2455. In the interactive version of Mitchell’s series browser you can click on a box and display links between series, as well as other series created by the same government agency. Again, it’s not just a way of seeing the collection, but a means of exploring and interpreting it. As Mitchell says:

Visualisation enables us to literally show everything, to display large volumes of data in a way that reveals patterns and communicates context, but also provides access to the fine grain of individual elements.1

But we can also employ such techniques to ask new kinds of questions. Can you imagine how Alexander Kelley and the other inhabitants of the Anzac Hostel must have felt in 1939? They had lost so much in the Great War, the ‘war to end all wars’, and yet within their own lifetime it was all happening again. More young men were answering the call, more lives were going to be destroyed.

There must have been a dreadful, disheartening moment when Australians realised that the Great War was not an end, but a beginning — the first in a series of devastating global conflicts. At some point the ‘Great War’ became the ‘First World War’, but when?

What is perhaps more intriguing is the dramatic peak in the occurrence of ‘the great war’ in 1939. It’s no surprise that the looming threat of a new conflict would provoke comment and comparisons, but it does make you wonder about the context of those discussions and how they might have changed as the reality of war edged closer.

To start exploring this I’ve harvested the content of the 6,600 articles from 1939 that included the phrase ‘the great war’. Using an online text analysis service called VoyeurTools I can quickly generate a picture of their contents.

This simple visualisation shows us the relative frequencies of words within the articles. It doesn’t reveal any great mysteries, but it does suggest some possibilities for further prodding. The prevalence of ‘time’ and ‘new’, for example — might these help us understand the shift in perspective from one war to the next? We can follow this up by browsing the different contexts in which the words were used.

But what actually is it that we’re actually searching? We know that Trove includes newspapers from 1803 to 1954, but if we’re really going to analyse shifting words and ideas it’s important to have a clear picture of the sources of those words.

Something like this perhaps. This graph shows the holdings of the Trove newspaper database on 4 August 2011, organised by state. You can see, for example, that if you’re searching on a topic between the 1920s and 1940s you’re probably likely to get more results from Queensland than anywhere else.

So starting from our location here, today, we can make connections across time and space. We can pull back and look at the big picture, or dive in and examine the fabric of a single life. Through the web we can build and explore a rich and complex contextual network.

It’s an exciting time to be a cultural data hacker. We now have a growing range of tools and technologies available for extracting interesting data from a wide variety of sources, both structured and unstructured.

The ‘Visible Archive’ project started with well-structured data, courtesy of Peter Scott, the developer of the Series System — the descriptive framework used by many Australian archives. But we’re rarely so lucky.

Even when the data starts off in nicely-organised fields in a database there’s no guarantee that that’s how it’s going to be delivered to our web browser. In order to extract the data from my Trove graphs, for example, I had to write a little program called a ‘screen scraper‘ to identify and save the important metadata elements from the raw web page itself.

Where there are no subject keywords we can infer them using techniques such as topic modelling. Where there are no access points we can identify people, organisations, places and events using special tools developed for named entity extraction. Where there are no common identifiers across datasets we can employ record linkage technologies to find possible connections.

We can count words, we can identify parts of speech, we can formulate a measure of the similarity of any two pieces of text. Once we have some useful data we can manipulate and enrich it. Place names can be geolocated — you simply send your place name off to a web service and get back its latitude and longitude.

Increasingly these sorts of tools are becoming accessible to anyone. For historians they offer a means of wrestling with rapidly-growing bulk of source material that is becoming available in digital form. How do you make use of 5 million digitised books, 50 million newspaper articles or the complete archive of every public message ever sent on Twitter?

The digital historian Dan Cohen has noted:

These computational methods which allow us to find patterns, determine relationships, categorize documents, and extract information from massive corpuses, will form the basis for new tools for research in the humanities and other disciplines in the coming decade.2

Dan is involved in a number of interesting projects investigating the possibilities of these techniques — often grouped together under the heading ‘text mining’. One of these projects, ‘With Criminal Intent‘, is looking to see what patterns can be drawn out of the digitised proceedings of criminal trials held at the Old Bailey from 1645 to 1913. That’s 197,745 trials, in case you were wondering.

Here’s one of their visualisations showing how the length of trials varies over time. Much to the surprise of the research team, this graph suggests a dramatic shift in legal practice around 1825 — defendants started pleading guilty!

Rather than falter under the growing weight of digital sources, these technologies can actually thrive. The more raw material available, the more chance there is to observe and track new patterns. As digitisation continues apace will we ever reach the point when history can simply be read from a graph?

There are some researchers at Harvard who seem to think that’s where we’re heading. Borrowing liberally from the store of scientific metaphors they have staked out the new field of ‘culturomics‘. By mining massive digital resources, like Google’s scanned books, they hope to map the ‘cultural genome’ that would enable us to follow the evolution of language and culture.

But there’s something quite barren in this ambition. I prefer the vision of digital humanist Stephen Ramsay, who commented in regard to the ‘With Criminal Intent’ project:

The Old Bailey, like the Naked City, has eight million stories. Accessing those stories involves understanding trial length, numbers of instances of poisoning, and rates of bigamy. But being stories, they find their more salient expression in the weightier motifs of the human condition: justice, revenge, dishonor, loss, trial. This is what the humanities are about. This is the only reason for an historian to fire up Mathematica or for a student trained in French literature to get into Java.3

Ultimately it’s the stories that nourish, anger, inspire and depress us. The closely-packed map of places recorded in World War I service records is so powerful because we know that under each marker are men, women, families, communities — each with their own story. These new technologies offer new perspectives, they raise new questions, and they challenge us with new contexts to explore and understand. But there is still space for stories and perhaps we can use them to give our stories new life and depth.

This is another World War One service record. It belongs to Charlie Allen. Charlie enlisted three times in the AIF and was discharged on medical grounds each time. It seems he had a problem with his ankle.

Charlie’s service record notes a tattoo, proclaiming his love for ‘Maud Gordon’. He married Maud in Sydney in 1917 and had two daughters soon after.

Charlie survived the war without further injury, but was not so lucky in peace. On 11 March 1938, Charlie was crushed to death between two railway cars. The accident happened at the Bunnerong Power Station, only a short distance from his home in Matraville. He was buried nearby in the Botany Cemetery.

We also know quite a bit about Charlie’s early life. Why? Because Charlie’s father was Chinese and he was therefore categorised as a ‘half-caste’, as someone who was not white, and therefore fell under the restrictions imposed by the White Australia Policy.

Charlie was born in Sydney in 1896. His mother was Frances Allen (sometime sweet shop owner and brothel keeper), his father Charlie Gum (a buyer for Wing On company). Charlie was raised by his mother, but in 1909, at the age of 13, he was taken to China by his father.

This certificate granted Charlie an exemption to the Dictation Test. Without it, he may not have been allowed back into the country.

Every time one of many thousands of non-Europeans resident in Australia sought to travel overseas and return home again they needed one of these certificates.

Charlie’s father returned to Sydney, leaving him in China. He lived with relatives in the town of Shekki (inland from Hong Kong). Charlie was naturally homesick, but had no means of getting back to Australia. He wrote to his mother in 1910:

Do try and bring me home every minute I think of you and long for a piece of bread and butter this tucker is not doing me well.4

His mother wrote to the Prime Minister Billy Hughes in an attempt to enlist government help but to no avail. Charlie finally returned to Australia in 1915.

Despite this experience, Charlie visited China again in 1922 for 7 months. Once again carrying papers to grant him re-entry to the country of his birth.

These fragments of Charlie’s life have been assembled by my partner, Kate Bagnall, a historian of Chinese-Australia. They are remarkable, and yet not so, because there are many thousands of stories like Charlie’s contained within the voluminous records generated by the administration of the White Australia Policy.

We’re all of course familiar with the general outlines of the White Australia Policy, and the way it underpinned conceptions of Australia as a nation in the first half of the 20th century.

But what we sometimes forget is that it was also a massive bureaucratic exercise.

Forms and certificates were printed, issued, used and filed. Regulations were modified, guidelines were distributed and administering officers were managed and advised. Individual cases were reviewed, policy was changed and new forms and certificates were printed, issued, used and filed…

Much of this system is now preserved in the National Archives.

You can get a idea of the range of material available from a case study Kate has prepared focusing on the efforts of Poon Gooey, a successful businessman in Horsham, to keep his wife and family in Australia.

If we look again at Charlie’s certificate from 1909 we can see that it contains a lot of interesting structured data:

• name
• place of birth
• age
• height
• destination
• date of departure
• name of ship

We estimate that there are probably about 50,000 of these forms remaining in the Archives, and then there’s case files and a variety of other government documents.

Wouldn’t it be great if we could extract this structured data. If we could piece together the slivers of identity that remain within the Archives and give people back their lives.

This is the dream of Invisible Australians, a project Kate and I are trying to turn into a reality. Our aim is to build systems that will enable this data to be extracted, aggregated, shared and connected — whether to a family tree, a cemetery record, or another document in another archive.

Imagine being able to navigate the network of lives, families and relationships. To follow their journeys, to share their tragedies, to celebrate their small victories against a repressive system.

Imagine being able to watch them age.

We tend to assume that new technologies require us to change, to adapt. But sometimes they can take advantage of our strengths. Mitchell Whitelaw is interested in finding out what happens when you take large cultural datasets and try to ‘show everything’. Such an approach, he suggests, takes advantage of the raw processing power of computers, while giving us space to do what we’re good at — finding patterns, making connections, crafting meanings.

The History Wall tries to create a similar sort of space. The History Wall brings together material from a range of different sources — newspaper articles from Trove, biographies from the Australian Dictionary of Biography, records from a database of NSW convicts, population statistics, collection items from the National Museum of Australia — you can pretty much plug anything in as long as it has a date attached to it.

For a particular year, the Wall retrieves a random sample from the available sources, jumbles everything up and then throws it onto the screen. As a result, no two views of the Wall are ever quite the same. This is not a traditional exhibition. There is no curator controlling the content or designing the structure. It’s ephemeral, it’s serendipitous — instead of relying on an authorial voice to smooth over the gaps and transitions, it leaves open the cracks and allows new contexts to seep in and around each item.

As the pioneering digital historian Edward Ayers noted:

even isolated and inert pieces of evidence — a list, a letter, a map, a picture — can assume new and unimagined meanings when placed in juxtaposition with other fragments.5

This is not an absence of narrative, but an opportunity for narration. Edward Ayers suggests that we’re actually quite comfortable filling in blanks and untwisting timelines:

Humans, presented with pieces of information about people, put things into the form of a story. They need not be simple stories, for we know how to deal with unexplained lapses of time, flashbacks, and overlapping narratives. We know how to imagine, infer, things happening at the same time in different places. Film and television train all of us at early ages to weave strands of narrative out of intentional (if carefully constructed) confusion and to take pleasure in that weaving.6

And so I can show you a death notice, or a certificate and you will take those fragments, those isolated data points and you will construct a story — you will see the person behind them, you will imagine their life. It’s what we do. We’re good at it.

Computers on the other hand will just see data.

In her ode in praise of humanities data, digital humanist Amanda French wonders whether we always need to crunch our data into abstract, pliable forms:

What I wonder is whether instead we can begin with the data, or with a datum, and simply watch for what it may tell us, even if what it tells us is simply a story.7

Yes we can. And we should teach computers how to do it as well. Not because we want them to take over. Not because they can necessarily do it faster or better. But because they can help us share, preserve and connect those stories.

Let’s think again about the array of documents that Kate has assembled to piece together the story of Charles Allen. How can you share this sort of material? Typically you’d ‘write it up’. You’d capture the story behind the data and commit it to words. The documents would then become evidence — points of connection between your text and the historical record.

So in order to share the meanings of these documents we remove them from the context of the person’s life and marshal them as allies to proclaim the authenticity of our rendering. Wouldn’t it be better if we could tell the story, but maintain within our texts the direct connections between sources and subject?

What we need is a data framework that sits beneath the text, identifying people, dates and places, and defining relationships between them and our documentary sources. A framework that computers could understand and interpret, so that if they saw something they knew was a placename they could head off and look for other people associated with that place. Instead of just presenting our research we’d be creating a whole series of points of connection, discovery and aggregation.

Sounds a bit far-fetched? Well it’s not. We have it already — it’s called the Semantic Web.

The Semantic Web exposes the structures that are implicit in our web pages and our texts in ways that computers can understand. The Linked Data movement takes the basic ideas of the Semantic Web and turns them into a collaborative activity. You share vocabularies, so that other people (and computers) know when you’re talking about the same sorts of things. You share identifiers, so that other people (and computers) know that you’re talking about a specific person, place, object or whatever.

Linked Data is Storytelling 101 for computers. It doesn’t have the full richness, complexity and nuance that we invest in our narratives, but it does at least help computers to fit all the bits together in meaningful ways. And if we talk nice to them, then they can apply their newly-acquired interpretative skills to the things that they’re already good at — like searching, aggregating, or generating the sorts of big pictures that enable us to explore the contexts of our stories.

This is why we’ve always imagined Invisible Australians to be something more than an online database. We want to provide points of connection that other people can build into their own stories. But to do that we have to pay attention to things like vocabulary management and authority control, we have to construct web addresses that are not going to break every time we upgrade our software. We have to think about the sorts of things we’re talking about — not just people, but government agencies, legislation, certificates, and correspondence. How do we describe these entities and what sorts of relationships do they have?

And of course we need to expose all these structures so that we can say, these things are people, these are events, these are places and these are documents.

Or perhaps, to introduce Alexander Kelley.

Or remember Charles Allen.

You might be wondering why we don’t just leave it all to the computers themselves. Didn’t I just talk about all the exciting new tools and techniques that enable us to analyse the structures of texts? Perhaps we should just wait for the Culturomics guys to solve all the problems.

But who defines the problems?

Our postmodern sensibilities encourage a suspicion of neutrality. Labels like ‘the new museology’ or Archives 2.0 reflect an awareness that the way we describe and arrange our collections is itself culturally-determined. It’s not just a matter of what our descriptive systems show, but what they hide.

Tim Hitchcock, another member of the ‘With Criminal Intent’ team, has described how online technologies can change the way we access archives. Instead of being forced to navigate the hierarchical structures that archives impose on records, which in turn tend to reflect the workings of the institutions that created the records, we can directly find the people whose lives were regulated, influenced, shaped or controlled by the policies of those institutions.

Instead of merely hearing ‘the institutional voice… in all its stentorian splendour’, he says, we can listen in to ‘the quieter tones uttered by the individual’.8

This reminds us that search boxes, along with other digital tools, themselves embody arguments. There are assumptions built into their code about what is relevant, what is significant, what is necessary.

We can build our own tools of course, and we can critique other people’s algorithms. But what if we just want to collect and share stories?

Linked Data gives us a way to present an alternative to Google’s version of the world. We can argue back against the search engines, defining our own criteria for relevance, and building our own discovery networks.

Changing the way we access resources changes the sorts of stories we can tell. Tim Hitchcock asks:

What happens when institutions and archives are ‘decentred’ in favour of the individual? What changes when we examine the world through the collected fragments of knowledge that we can recover about a single person, reorganised as a biographical narrative, rather than as part of an archival system?9

Perhaps the invisible become visible.

1. Mitchell Whitelaw, ‘Visualising archival collections: the Visible Archive project’, Archives and Manuscripts, vol. 37, no. 2, November 2009, pp. 22-40.
2. Cohen, Dan, ‘From Babel to Knowledge’, D-Lib Magazine, vol. 12, 2006.
3. Stephen Ramsay, ‘Prison Art’, delivered at the Digging into Data Conference, June 2011, http://lenz.unl.edu/papers/2011/06/10/prison-art.html
4. Letter from Charles Allen to Frances Allen, NAA: ST84/1, 1909/22/41-50
5. Edward L Ayers, ‘History in hypertext’, 1999, http://www.vcdh.virginia.edu/Ayers.OAH.html
6. Edward L Ayers, ‘History in hypertext’, 1999, http://www.vcdh.virginia.edu/Ayers.OAH.html
7. Amanda French, ‘In Praise of Humanities Data’, November 2010, http://www.scribd.com/doc/50066437/In-Praise-of-Humanities-Data
8. Tim Hitchcock, ‘Digital Searching and the Re-formulation of Historical Knowledge’, in Mark Greengrass and Lorna Hughes (eds), The Virtual Representation of the Past, Ashgate, Farnham, UK, 2008, pp. 81-90.
9. Tim Hitchcock, ‘Digital Searching and the Re-formulation of Historical Knowledge’, in Mark Greengrass and Lorna Hughes (eds), The Virtual Representation of the Past, Ashgate, Farnham, UK, 2008, p. 90.

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Learned friends, a little over twelve months ago, I had the honour of addressing another distinguished gathering. My subject on that occasion was a rather unusual artefact that my colleagues and I had discovered – an item we came to call ‘The Cabinet of Curiosities‘. In the intervening months we have continued our researches into this object and have uncovered some disturbing facts. To be blunt, I believe that we have unearthed evidence of a widespread and long-standing conspiracy.

I warn you now that being made privy to our researches may expose you to intimidation and scorn, perhaps even derision. You may be forced to confront evil forces beyond your imaginings – forces that seek to compress our understanding, to contain our creativity, to maintain our silence. Yes you may be called into battle against those evil powers encircling and ensnaring us – politicians, accountants, managers, and science communicators…

I warn you now so that you have the opportunity to leave, to block your ears, or hide beneath your tables…

Thank you, you are a brave and sturdy lot indeed.

Let us first go back to the beginning – to the ‘Cabinet of Curiosities‘ itself. For those of you who were not present at the Cabinet’s unveiling last year, let me recapitulate our initial findings.

The Cabinet’s origins were obscure. It is known that some two hundred years ago a young botanist by the name of Joseph Banks visited these shores and collected a great number of plant and animal specimens. These were transported to Britain aboard the Endeavour, contained within an assortment of wooden chests. While it appeared there may be some connection with these, this Cabinet was clearly a much more complex item.

Indeed, it was reminiscent of the collector’s chests assembled by gentlefolk in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Such chests often displayed natural history specimens along with human artefacts. The memento hominem, on the other hand, was biographical in intent. Presenting items that together told the story of a life. What could not be doubted was that this Cabinet also told a story. It is in seeking to unravel this story that we began to discover the Cabinet’s meaning – and, might I add its warning.

A clue to the purpose of the Cabinet was contained within an inscription found on the top panel. If I might read it:

This Cabinet holds many treasures. Two hundred years of Australian science are arrayed for exploration and reflection. The curiosities contained are those of Australia’s men and women of science, and your own. Open, examine and understand.

There follows a quotation, dated 1939, from Sir William Bragg:

‘The spirit in which knowledge is sought, and the manner in which it is used, are more important, more real, than knowledge itself’ – Sir William Bragg, 1939.

Two hundred years of Australian science… in a box. It seems preposterous, a mere folly. But as we shall see, its intent is far from frivolous.

And so to the unravelling… If we are to explore ‘Australian science’ as the inscription on this Cabinet suggests, we might perhaps examine what we see… or see what we examine… Australia offered new horizons for scientific discovery and yet these were largely perceived through old eyes – European eyes. This changed of course, but how and when?

Then, of course, there is the matter of communication. Science cannot function without it, and yet Australian scientists were isolated – victims we presume, perhaps too hastily, of the ‘tyranny of distance’. But what did isolation mean, and how was it overcome?

One might also examine the role of empire – those political and economic forces that create the space within which science is able to flourish. Or is science more of a participant in this process than a product?

In our initial study of the Cabinet we therefore identified three themes:

• The way in which the Australian environment was perceived… ‘all things queer and opposite’, as was inscribed on the minute book of a scientific society in Tasmania;
• The counterposed forces of isolation and independence;
• And the role of science, as some commentators have described it, as the ‘handmaiden of empire’.

My colleagues and I believe that these themes correspond to the three sections of this Cabinet of Curiosities… Did I mention there were three sections, divided thus, and held together by this arrangement of iron bars and locks.

In this first section, corresponding we suppose to the first theme, there are four trays. The first contains a series of paintings which, to my eye, represent a verdant land despoiled, then restored. Remaking upon remaking. Re-vision upon revision. It is difficult to imagine that our colleagues of some 130 years prior regarded the bush as silent, and sought to introduce British songbirds to alleviate this auditory oppression. But they did. However, amongst these same scientists were the first to argue for protected areas to preserve the Australian environment. This Cabinet offers no glib slogans, no easy answers, suggesting, nonetheless, that in remaking we are…remade.

The second tray, appears to be a map. This land, of course, became known to science through exploration, through mapping – the creation of legends, both cartographic and otherwise. Many of our famous explorers were scientists – Leichardt, a naturalist; Wills (of Bourke and…) was lured away from the Magnetic Observatory on Flagstaff Hill in Melbourne. But what conventions were used in such mapping? What was sought, and what was found?

The next tray offers a rather different perspective – it looks up, to the heavens. As well as a new land, Australia offered a new sky for exploration. On being appointed Governor, amateur astronomer, Sir Thomas Brisbane, exclaimed ‘With a virgin sky, what might not be achieved?’ Indeed, astronomers like John Tebbutt followed in Brisbane’s wake, carving out an international reputation. But astronomical achievement is surely more than just a matter of geographic positioning. The means and the will are also required – there are many views to be figured.

The last tray in this section is, curiously, empty. Have its contents been lost, or was it left deliberately blank. It may be that its silence speaks more eloquently than any installation. Asking us whose voices are heard and whose are not. Even as we begin to perceive the contours of western science in Australia, we become aware of its meeting with alternative ways of knowing – those of the country’s original inhabitants. This emptiness perhaps represents opportunities missed, paths not taken, messages not heard – or… yet to be heard? It may lay empty… waiting.

Now let us direct our attention to the second section – this bank of six drawers. As I have mentioned, our hypothesis is that this section relates to issues of isolation and independence, and indeed the complex interrelationship of the two. Interestingly, the drawers seem to be grouped in pairs.

From the first pair peers the puzzling platypus, a reference perhaps to the perceived oddness of the land examined in the first section, but a symbol, too, of new knowledge. How is knowledge created? Its claims authenticated? The naturalist George Bennett laboured over many years to unravel the mysteries of the platypus’s reproductive system. Bennett procured and pickled a plenitude of platypi. He observed them in the field, and gathered many reports, nonetheless, it was his correspondent in Britain, Sir Richard Owen, who drew the conclusions. Owen firmly believed that the platypus gave birth to live young, and Bennett deferred to his well-positioned colleague, despite evidence he had collected that suggested they lay eggs. But was this the only option for colonial scientists? Were they of necessity confined to roles as mere collectors servicing the British men of science?

The second pair of drawers appears to elaborate upon this theme, moving the focus to botany and taxonomic determinations. The main reference would appear to be to Australia’s premier nineteenth century botanist, Ferdinand von Mueller. Mueller travelled widely throughout the country, collected and described thousands of specimens and yet was allocated a subsidiary role in the production of the Flora Australensis. Authority was reserved to a British expert with ready access to the botanical type-specimens stored at Kew Gardens. Sensible enough. Like Bennett, the Baron found himself on the outskirts of a scientific network centred on Europe. But wait… the picture is more complex, for Mueller himself was the centre of a network of collectors throughout Australia – people of varying background and experience, whose loyalty and diligence Mueller deliberately cultivated. There are networks within networks, worlds within worlds. Each drawer we unlock opens more paths for exploration.

It is communication that knits together these networks and sustains these relationships. In the third pair of drawers we find hints of correspondence, the remnants of a science practised over time and distance. By careful analysis, we have identified William Henry Bragg as the author of a number of these fragments. Other images seem to refer to Frank Macfarlane Burnet. Significantly, both were Nobel prize-winners, Bragg for physics and Burnet for medicine, though almost half a century separated their awards. Perhaps more important, however, is the contrast in their career paths. Although Bragg began his research in Australia, isolation from the leading practitioners forced him to move to Britain. Burnet, on the other hand, rebuilt the field of immunology from within Australia. Apparently he felt no such isolation. Why this difference? The Cabinet asks us.

From the personal to the political – the final section encourages us to investigate the political and economic context of science in Australia. Curiosity is not the only factor that shapes research. Indeed, the first drawer reminds us of the many, potentially devastating problems that faced the agricultural industries in the early decades of this century. Introduced pests and weeds, animal diseases and soil quality were included in the challenging check-list presented to the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research when it was established in 1926. Australia’s research agenda thus reflected its economic position – though this arrangement was not without its tensions.

Fragments of scientific formulae discovered within the final drawer have been found to relate to radio astronomy. You will recall that this exciting field of endeavour arose out of radar research during the Second World War. Australian scientists led the way. Indeed, the war reshaped Australia’s scientific community, and science itself emerged from the war with a new, should I say awesome, reputation. The consequences of this are only hinted at. There is so much to consider. Layer and layers of meaning. Questions… many questions…

These were the limits of our original hypotheses, and I would like to express once more gratitude to my esteemed colleagues in this endeavour – Greg St John, David Watt, Lisa Cianci, Nola Farman, David Nugent, Kate Murphy, Neil Roberts, Antoinette De Morton, Peta Cross, and Adrian Jones. Since then we have continued our studies both here and abroad, travelling with the Cabinet by ship to London for further research. We have been most fortunate in discovering a set of papers (you might call them records) relating to the Cabinet and its creators, in particular to the activities of an individual whom we know only by the pseudonym Professor Duckbill.

It would appear that most of our original hypotheses were correct, some of Duckbill’s notes elaborate on the basic themes of the Cabinet, and I quote:

The Cabinet of Curiosities is intended to provide a representation of the development of science in Australia. Or is that the development of Australian science? Is there a difference? What does it mean to say that Australia has developed its own scientific culture?… Questions about the development of science in Australia cannot be easily divorced from questions about science itself. Science is international, but it is also local, it permeates our lives and our histories. By exploring the experience of Australian scientists we learn more about the way science is disseminated, encouraged and, indeed, retarded. But by reflecting on the processes and structures of science we gain new perspectives on the Australian experience.

Duckbill concludes:

The Cabinet of Curiosities is neither about science, nor Australia, but about the sites at which these two meet – within the experience, achievements, hardships and glories of Australia’s men and women of science.

But for us the question that remains is – ‘WHY?’ Why did Duckbill go to all this trouble? Why embed a dissertation on Australia’s scientific past within such a odd structure? Why did he choose to communicate through these mysterious signs and symbols, through hints and insinuations rather than a more conventional means of discourse. The answer is – conspiracy. A conspiracy to suppress all attempts to explore the history of Australian science. Duckbill’s papers reveal that he spent many years seeking to raise awareness and understanding of Australia’s scientific past, until he was eventually overtaken by the forces of ignorance and banal utility.

The Cabinet was the only means of communication that remained, its messages were buried deeply enough to escape the notice of those conspiring against such narratives. Its very complexity and richness of meaning allowed it to pass into posterity where someone might discover it and begin to unravel its stories. It is an encoded message that has slipped past the censors of memory, the dictators of our past, the manufacturers of our …’heritage’.

But where is the evidence of this conspiracy? I tender first a publication which may be familiar to you – A History of Australia, by Manning Clark. Volumes 5 and 6 of this mammoth work encompass the period 1888-1935, but a perusal of their indices is revealing – there are no entries for science… nothing. But surely more recent works have redressed this imbalance? I further tender Volume 4 of the Oxford History of Australia. This volume covers the period 1901-1942, a time of great change in Australian science, which included the establishment of the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research. Let us look under ‘science’… nothing. Hmmm, perhaps under Council for Scientific and Industrial Research? Ah yes, page 226:

The National-Country Party administration… made a major initiative of the Commonwealth Institute of Science and Industry, recognised and greatly expanded in 1926 as the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research.

That appears to be all…

Where is science in Australian history? To quote from some of Duckbill’s early writings:

What sorts of images are conjured up when we think about Australia’s history? Intrepid explorers perhaps? Brave Anzacs on the shores of Gallipoli? Or maybe gold rushes, and the development of the wool and wheat industries. But science and scientists? How many Australian scientists can you name? Can we really say Australia has a scientific heritage?

“Can we really say…”, is this an indication that Duckbill was already aware of the ways in which Australia’s scientific heritage was being marginalised, if not actively suppressed? His next passage provides us with some compelling evidence:

Have you ever looked closely at the faces on the $100 note? On one side is Douglas Mawson, antarctic explorer and geologist. On the other side is the astronomer John Tebbutt. That’s right, they’re both scientists. What about the $50 note? There you will find Ian Clunies-Ross, chairman of the CSIRO from 1949-1959, and Howard Florey, who won a Nobel Prize for his work on penicillin. Yes, another two scientists. On the $20 note? Laurence Hargreaves, aeronautical engineer…

So, by special arrangement with my bankers, I have a $100 note with me tonight. If you inspect it as Duckbill suggests, you will find no scientists. Nor on any of the other notes. Scientists have been erased from our currency! I ask, who is responsible for this? Surely some evil conspiracy to obliterate all evidence of Australia’s scientific achievements is afoot?

Ahhh, you say, there is no conspiracy, after all are we not in the midst of ‘Science Week’, a period specifically set aside to celebrate Australian science? Am I alone in finding something disturbing, nay insidious, in this event – in this science week. Is this just another way of partitioning science off from the rest of our culture, of maintaining the separation so obvious in our history books. We dedicate a week to science, so we can ignore it the rest of the year. And instead of promoting inquiry into the way science is tightly bound to the whorls of our history, our society, our very being, we are treated to a cavalcade of the queer and the quizzical – a celebration of trivia.

The time is past for putting eggs in milk bottles!

The time is past for gooey green slime!

It is time to know who we are!

Duckbill did, at one point, begin to investigate the role of science in our understanding of what it is to be Australian. To quote him:

The stump-jump plough, the Coolgardie safe – there are examples of technological innovation wedded to versions of our national identity. The idealised bushman had an ingenious streak that always enabled him to ‘make-do’, no matter what the circumstances. But such innovation was constrained by a narrow, conservative pragmatism, that dared not think beyond immediate needs. For every Victa mower or Hills hoist, there are many other inventions or ideas that were ignored, rejected or ridiculed. Lawrence Hargrave, a brilliant inventor whose work did much to hasten the development of powered flight, commented in 1892: ‘The people of Sydney who can speak of my work without a smile are very scarce’.

How is this to be overcome, Duckbill argues:

An understanding of Australia’s scientific heritage might help prise open the grimly locked jaws of narrow-minded pragmatism. The portrait of the Australian who merely responds to circumstances could be replaced by one of the imaginative thinker, the long-term strategist, the creative spirit, the visionary. The history of Australian science can provide a reservoir of images and examples to build this new identity, and establish a creative environment for future growth and prosperity.

But we should recognise there is a danger here as well – a danger that in seeking to gain popular attention we may ourselves trivialise Australia’s scientific past, reducing it to a parade of the ‘great men of science’. It is all to easy to lapse into the cult of hero worship, to reduce people to icons. As a culture we are scared of complexity. It is simplest and safest to put scientists in boxes – whether they be marked, hero, villain or nerd – the result is the same, they are not us. They are something other to our experience, to our lives.

I myself have been inclined to fall into this trap. I remember indeed, that at the time of my first Cabinet presentation, I was interviewed on a wireless program. ‘Who do you think was Australia’s greatest scientist?’ the presenter asked me. I answered not with one of our Nobel prizewinners, like Howard Florey or Macfarlane Burnet, but with David Rivett. ‘What did he discover?’ came the question in response, leaving me momentarily at a loss. I babbled something about his significance not relating to any particular discovery, but to his work in establishing CSIR as a world-class scientific organisation, to his great idealism and passion for science which he would not resign even in the face of brutal political attacks. But my answer was clearly unsatisfactory, the presenter wanted labels not issues, trophies, not people.

More recently I heard a discussion on the wireless relating to ‘unsung heroes’ of Australian history. Apparently it is a regular item, and it just so happened that the two heroes being sung on this occassion were scientists – Ferdinand von Mueller, and John Tebbutt. However, my initial pleasure at having scientists included in such a forum, quickly turned to frustration.

I have already spoken of Mueller’s significance, but what were the two key achievements proclaimed by this commentator to justify Mueller’s inclusion in the pantheon of “unsung heroes”. First, that he sent eucalyptus seeds around the world, so that we can now see gum trees in California; and second, that he planted marrum grass on Australian beaches to prevent erosion. That was it. There was no indication of Mueller’s broader scientific achievements, no understanding of the development of science in Australia – indeed, I doubt whether the words science or scientist were used at all. It seemed rather that Mueller and Tebbutt were being included almost apologetically – ‘well, you know they were scientists, but they did some interesting things as well’. Instead of being introduced as active contributors to our knowledge of the natural world and to Australian culture, they were presented as oddities – mere trinkets on the sideboard of Australian history.

It is not merely the people, but the processes of science that have to be revealed. Naming names, recalling feats, is only a beginning, a chink of light appearing around the corner of a door, slightly ajar. We must throw open this door. We must find the science that is in the fabric of who we are and what we do. As Duckbill says:

Just as Australia has looked overseas for advice and expertise, so ordinary Australians have tended to see science as an external source of authority rather than as a constituent part of their own culture. They are expected to adapt to technological change, but are given little encouragement to participate in the processes by which such change is implemented. But Australia’s scientific heritage provides a ready antidote to the mystification of science and technology. Scientists become people with the same sorts of ambitions, loves, hopes and fears that we all harbour. Technology is robbed of its omnipotence, and is recast as the fruit of human ingenuity and endeavour.

Dangerous words indeed. It is little wonder then that Duckbill was silenced, reduced to speaking through a mysterious wooden box.

Of Duckbill’s fate we are uncertain, the organisation he established here in Canberra was disbanded in unusual circumstances, and he disappeared from view. There are some who believe he is still alive, working underground, taking advantage of new technology to disseminate his ‘heresies’.

For the moment though we are left with this – the Cabinet of Curiosities. It stands before us as a starting point, a rallying cry, a call to arms – are we brave enough to meet its challenges?

On Sunday I was listening to the local ABC station, 2CN, when a bloke came on talking about “unsung heroes” of Australian history. Apparently it’s a regular spot, and it so happened that the two heroes being sung on Sunday were scientists – Ferdinand von Mueller the botanist, and John Tebbutt, the astronomer. However, my initial pleasure at having scientists included in such a forum, quickly turned to frustration.

Many, perhaps most, of you would have heard of Mueller. He was probably Australia’s greatest nineteenth century scientist: Victorian Government botanist for 40 years, an explorer who collected and classified thousands of specimens, a prolific correspondent who maintained a vast network of collectors throughout Australia, an international figure whose unequalled knowledge of Australian flora was widely recognised in the scientific centres of Europe.

But what were the two key achievements proclaimed by this radio commentator to justify Mueller’s inclusion in the pantheon of “unsung heroes”. First, that he sent eucalyptus seeds around the world, so that we can now see gum trees in California; and second, that he planted marrum grass on Australian beaches to prevent erosion. That was it. There was no indication of Mueller’s broader scientific achievements, no understanding of the development of science in Australia – indeed, I doubt whether the words science or scientist were used at all. It seemed rather that Mueller and Tebbutt were being included almost apologetically – ‘well, you know they were scientists, but they did some interesting stuff as well’. Instead of being introduced as active contributors to our knowledge of the natural world and to Australian culture, they were presented as oddities – mere trinkets on the sideboard of Australian history.

Perhaps this is not surprising, despite Australia’s strong record of scientific achievement, the scientist does not really fit our myths of national identity. The closest we come is probably the ingenious ‘make-do’ bushman, able to cobble together all manner of useful gadgets from a roll of barbed wire and a jam tin. But this is ultimately a conservative image, it is simply pragmatism, not a passion for knowledge, that is assumed to be the driving force. What is celebrated by such myths is not creativity, inspiration or genius, but simply a capacity to respond to circumstances. Consequently, we have had several generations of schoolkids believing that the heights of Australian scientific and technological achievement can be summed up in three words – STUMP JUMP PLOUGH.

At this point I must make a confession. I recently prepared an article for the Oxford Companion to Australian History on the history of Australian science, or rather the historiography of Australian science. In it, I argued that one of the problems with the field is that too much of the history of Australian science has been written by scientists. This seems a rather unfriendly thing to say on an occasion such as this, but let me explain. The point of my argument was not to denigrate the many thorough and detailed historical studies of scientific institutions, personalities and disciplines conducted by scientists, but rather to highlight the failure of the broader historical community to incorporate science into their studies of Australian life and culture. The historians aren’t pulling their weight. Where is science in the various survey histories of Australia? – if you’re lucky you may find a reference to William Farrer, or perhaps myxomatosis, but not much else. This separation between Australian history and Australian science continues, I believe, to the detriment of both.

But instead of just complaining, as I seem to do quite often, let’s chart a plan of action, inspired by Murray Upton’s fine example. After all, if the historians aren’t yet ready to take up the challenge, then the burden lies even more heavily with you – it is up to the scientific community to ensure that its own achievements, activities, culture and development are adequately documented, that its stories are told. But where to start? I foresee a battle waged on three fronts:

1. the records
2. the people
3. the history

the records

In the preface to his book, Murray makes some insightful comments about changing recordkeeping practices in science, and the likely impact of this on the work of future historians. As Murray mentions, perhaps the most frightening prospect is that presented by electronic documents – email, databases, notes – all those things you create on your computer on a day to day basis. We can still read Joseph Banks’s journal of the Endeavour voyage more than 200 years after it was written. In 200 years time will it be possible for a historian to read your records? This is not simply a job for archivists. The way such records are created and disposed of means that archivists and scientists need to be working together to develop strategies and procedures. In the past, institutions could put off any action on archives until the retirement of a long-serving staff member. But scientists now are often on short-term contracts, each time they move, change jobs, change institutions, records are lost. Institutions can no longer rely on archivists being able to come in and clean-up after the science has been done, if they do so, they risk losing a substantial chunk of their corporate memory – our scientific memory.

Why does this matter? Well, I’ve already gestured towards the cultural and historical arguments for preserving our scientific heritage, but there are also some important practical considerations. As you all know science is practised within an ever-growing regulatory framework. There are a raft of legal obligations, issues of intellectual property, patent rights, concerns about scientific fraud, all of which can only be dealt with by instituting adequate recordkeeping processes.

It’s not all doom and gloom, however, as organisations such as Australian Archives (now National Archives) are beginning to recognise the special requirements of scientific recordkeeping, and of course the Australian Science Archives Project, is always willing to provide advice and assistance.

the people

I’ve always believed that one of the most important ways of getting the general public interested in the history of Australian science is through stories about scientists themselves. By exploring their achievements, their hopes, their failures, their passions, you break down the barriers of fear and intimidation that tend to alienate the public from science, encouraging instead the realisation that scientists are people too. Having met on the common ground of our own humanity, it is then possible to carry the audience beyond, to open up areas of science that had previously seemed remote and forbidding.

And so with a work like Murray’s we find that it is the characters that emerge most clearly – the tragic, the foolish, the heroic and the inspired. We recognise in these figures elements of ourselves, our friends, our colleagues and we make a connection. From there we begin to perceive the context, to assemble the pieces in our own minds and grasp the broader significance – entomology, CSIRO, Australian science, Australian culture. Murray comments that he found few documents recording ‘social history’ and yet within the lives of his characters we find many clues to the changing nature of Australian society: restrictions on the employment of women, for example, highlighted by the tragic suicide of Mary Fuller; or the Cold War hysteria surrounding the employment of Sergei Paramonov.

I’m not advocating wholesale hagiography. The establishment of a gallery of scientific heroes doesn’t really interest me as either a consumer or creator of history. I’m talking about revealing scientists as people, not about turning them into icons. In pursuing this task there are many lives left to be documented, many stories to be told. Record your memories, write down your anecdotes, pass on your stories.

As an indication both of what can be done, and what remains to be done, you might like to go away and explore Bright Sparcs. Bright Sparcs is a resource on the WWW that contains information on over 3,000 Australian scientists from the 18^th century to the present – it includes biographical, archival and bibliographical details, with links to some memoirs, obituaries and historical articles. Contributions are always welcome.

the history

When faced with such a thorough piece of work as Murray Upton’s history of the ANIC, it is perhaps tempting to cross the topic off the list and think ‘Well, that bit of history’s been done’. But, of course, history doesn’t work like that – there is no end, there is no final product. There will always be new perspectives, new interpretations, people and events will be examined in different contexts. By this constant ravelling and unravelling our insights and understandings develop.

I’m sure that Murray would join with me in urging you not to see this book as the final word on the subject. Murray’s meticulous research has provided us with a new baseline in the history of entomology in Australia – a new starting point, not an endpoint. In coming together today to congratulate Murray and the Australian National Insect Collection, we must also be aware that this book confronts us with a challenge – a challenge to continue this work.