May 2012
Watch this space!
Our online database is taking shape and we expect to release it for online use later this
year. We are using open-source software developed for the International Council on
Archives known as ICA-AtoM (Access to Memory) which is based on the
international standards for archival description. Describing our records to the
international standard has meant that additional research needed to be undertaken on
the organisations and people whose records we hold which will be of long-term
benefit for our researchers.
Data input, both manual and automatic upload, is underway for all our business
archives collections, personal papers, the University archives and the Pacific Research
Archives. We will tackle our trade union and organisation collections when these are
completed.
Our familiar red binders of deposit descriptions and lists are being entered in our
database.
Pennie Pemberton retires
Archivist Dr Pennie Pemberton was farewelled by past and present staff, researchers
and colleagues from other archives last month. As an ANU undergraduate, Pennie
first worked for the Archives of Business and Labour as a vacation student in
December 1967. She worked here for over 25 years with her longest stints being as
Deputy Archives Officer from 1976 to 1987 and the most recent one from 1998. In
between she worked as the Archivist for Pilkington Brothers in Britain and completed
the requirements for a PhD.
Pennie has an intimate knowledge of our vast Australian Agricultural Company
collection. Her invaluable book, Pure Merinos and Others: The Shipping Lists of The
Australian Agricultural Company (PDF 46.1MB) (1986) is out of print, but is now
accessible from our website following public demand. Pennie was also the driving
force behind the publication of the two volumes of In the Service of the Company:
Letters of Sir Edward Parry, Commissioner to the Australian Agricultural Company,
1829-1834.
She also has an encyclopaedic knowledge of many other collections and has made
many valuable contributions to the ANU Archives over the years including our online
map catalogue, our location index (known as Location, Location),an index to Tooth
and Company records about thousands of hotels, a guide to every building on the
ANU campus, and a guide to the extensive ACTU collection among many others. We
miss her already, though as expected, she has already been back several times as a
researcher.
Pennie with her sister-in-law Sue at her farewell
Nuked!
Our new exhibition, Nuked, to be launched in June has been curated by Museum
Practice students, Alex Mandziy, Gideon Hallam-Walsh and Katrina Ramm from the
Canberra Institute of Technology. It features items from the Noel Butlin Archives
Centre and the National Museum of Labour about Australian anti-nuclear protests.
Marie Reay papers
Pacific Archivist Karina Taylor has been processing the papers of Dr Marie Reay,
with the assistance of postgraduate anthropology student Zazie Bowen. Dr Reay
worked as a Research Fellow in the Research School of Pacific Studies Department of
Anthropology from 1959 until her retirement in 1988.
Marie conducted her first field research with Aboriginal communities in western New
South Wales and then later extended her fieldwork to Borroloola in the Northern
Territory. From1953, as a doctoral student supervised by W E Stanner, she began
field research in the Wahgi Valley in the Western Highlands of Papua New Guinea,
with the Kuma. She published her revised PhD thesis as The Kuma: Freedom and
Conformity in the New Guinea Highlands in 1959. Her papers are extensive and
contain at least two unpublished book-length manuscripts which Professor Francesca
Merlan of the current Department of Archaeology and Anthropology is keen to see
published.
Staff and scholars in the Anthropology Department, Research School of Pacific
Studies in 1955 including Marie Reay, seated far right in front row,next to Professor
Siegfried Nadel. Dr W E Stanner is also seated in the front row.