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

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

The work of documenting society is carried out by a wide range of organisations, institutions and initiatives that are committed to enabling the long-term preservation of and access to Australia’s documentary heritage – or the documentary component of Australia’s national estate. Australia is blessed with a strong network of national and state archives and libraries, all of which are publicly funded and enabled by governing legislation that confers a range of functions and powers on each institution. For example, each of the nine government archives at national, state and territory levels have legislation giving the archives the power to determine how long public records must be retained and which ones should be designated as worthy of ongoing archival preservation. National and state libraries have legal deposit legislation for publications that have recently been extended to cover electronic publications. The work of these national and state institutions is expanded by a range of documentary preservation programs within universities, local museums and libraries and community-based documentary preservation programs such as indigenous keeping places and immigrant community archives. With all of this activity it is clear that there is no shortage of commitment to the documentation of Australian society in a wide range of settings, though there is of course often a shortage of funding and skilled staff to sustain these various documentation programs. What is also lacking are the mechanisms to ensure the planning and coordination of these various initiatives to ensure that the totality of these efforts are delivering a representative and comprehensive documentary memory for the benefit of current and future generations.

To pursue a nationally coordinated approach to the documentation mission practitioners need to, in the words of David Bearman, ‘focus our appraisal methods on selecting what should be documented rather than what documentation should be kept’ (Bearman, 1989, pp. 14-15). In the words of Richard Cox, we need to identify the most ‘salient and important features of contemporary institutions and society’ (Cox, 1994, p.24) and work collectively to ensure that adequate documentary evidence of these features is captured and preserved by archives.

The aim is to achieve better planning and coordination of distributed efforts to preserve and provide access to a representative corpus of documentary heritage materials to help current and future generations understand, debate and interrogate the nature of human experiences in Australia. In an environment of shrinking overall funding for documentary heritage programs, it is more important than ever for practitioners nationwide to be seen to be working together to ensure that we spend our limited budgets in ways that help deliver the best possible collective outcomes for preserving and providing access to a documentary heritage estate.

From time to time, Royal Commissions into significant issues, scandals and injustices in Australian life such as the ‘stolen [indigenous] generations’, institutional responses to child sexual abuse and forced child migration have highlighted gaps in the available documentation. This in turn has mobilised resources and collaborative action to fill these gaps through initiatives such as oral history and indexing projects. While these efforts have inevitably been somewhat piecemeal, they do show what can be done when there is a collective recognition of the need to do a better job of documenting Australian society.

The question of what aspects of human experience are under-represented or ‘silenced’ in documentary holdings is one that has exercised the minds of archivists and librarians for generations. Although it is not a new question, it is one that continues to resonate in our discourse, as is demonstrated by recent attention that has been given to the question of silences in the archive (Moss and Thomas, 2021; Hegarty, 2022, pp. 31-46).

What are the diverse and non-mainstream aspects of life in this country that are underdocumented? Where might such documentation be made and kept and by whom? The ‘by whom’ question is just as critical, if not more critical, than the ‘what to keep’ question. We should not assume it should just be done by ‘us’, on ‘our’ terms – by professionally trained archivists and librarians working in national and state institutions. Those groups whose experiences have been neglected, ignored or under-represented in our efforts to date may or may not appreciate being belatedly patronised by established programs. Our responsibility, I would argue, is not to invite the under-represented into our spaces and establishments – but rather to be willing (and to be seen to be willing) to be invited into the spaces and networks of these other groups to provide some advice, assistance, moral support and resources.

Before delving into the pre-history of the initiative, it is necessary to define its scope. It is primarily focused on decisions regarding what documentary heritage needs to be identified for long-term preservation. Other essential activities such as description of and access to those heritage materials are out of scope for this article. As important as description and access regimes may be, decisions about what to keep and what not to keep are absolutely fundamental to the success or failure of our collective efforts. Decisions (either conscious or unconscious) to not preserve documentation represents the ultimate denial of access to that documentation.

The Documenting Australian Society steering committee will continue reaching out to new partners and stakeholders in an effort to broaden our reach and sustain our efforts. We will keep a close watch on similar initiatives in other countries and will seek to emulate good models and initiatives. With the national government having developed a new national cultural policy called ‘Revive’, we hope that there will be space in this policy for the kind of coordination of efforts and outcomes that is our vision for documentary heritage in Australia. Funding for the initiative is an ongoing challenge, given that the UNESCO Australian Memory of the World Program has no reliable source of income. We are most grateful, therefore, for the sponsorship of the Australian Society of Archivists and the National Archives of Australia for events such as our seminars – for otherwise there would be very little that we could accomplish.

We will never achieve a state of perfection – or documentary heritage nirvana – regardless of how well we cooperate and notwithstanding how clear and compelling our vision might be. We will always have gaps and inconsistencies, not the least because of the inevitability of funding shortfalls, political complexities and the irreconcilability of contestable and contingent perspectives and world views across our domains. Indeed, it is the nature of this complex and contingent beast that I think we will and should always, be constructively dissatisfied with the results of our collective efforts. Continuous improvement will always be necessary.

But just because we might never achieve perfection does not mean we are not all obliged morally and professionally to work together as well as we can to do the best we possibly can do, given all of the constraints and realities mentioned above. It would be unfair for future generations to condemn us for trying but failing to achieve perfection. But future generations would be absolutely entitled to condemn us if we do not even try to do something about the challenge or, worse, pretend that the problem does not exist.

Collectively, there is a need to develop and operationalise frameworks and mechanisms that can help guide the making of hard choices and agreeing and allocating responsibilities. These frameworks and mechanisms need to be evidence-based, defensible, coherent, realistic, inclusive, holistic, contestable, transparent and capable of evolving. The work needs to be informed by a thorough understanding of the current state of Australian documentary heritage holdings – its strengths, weaknesses, gaps and overlaps. Our baseline, if you like. More importantly, and far more challenging, it needs to be informed by knowledge of, and some level of agreement on, what is important and distinctive about the diversity and complexity of life in Australia that has to be reflected in our documentary heritage, in order to help current and future generations interrogate and understand Australian society. Our responsibility is to ensure that important aspects of Australian life are not neglected as a result of well-meaning but disjointed, fragmented and ad hoc efforts pursued in the absence of a holistic regime that provides support and resources to diverse, community-driven documentary preservation programs.

The objectives of the initiative are ambitious, if not audacious. It will not be easy to make progress. We must avoid the temptation to try to ‘boil the ocean’, but rather make progress in small and incremental steps. But if something is important, the fact that it may be difficult is no reason not to attempt to advance the issue and that we would stand to be condemned if we do not try our best to achieve success. Gallant failure is preferable to a lack of action, or indeed a lack of acknowledgement of the importance of the issue.