My hunt through SP115/1: day 1
I spent today at the National Archives in Sydney, looking at records for my Paper Trails project. My helpful reference officer, Judith, had warned me that there were 77 boxes in SP115/1, the series I need to look through. On…
Where are the women?
Yesterday on Twitter Jenny Symington asked the question, ‘Where are the women?’ in relation to The real face of White Australia: this is interesting. Where are the women?? @invisibleaus RT Invisible Australians project invisibleaustralians.org/faces/from @wragge @jonnybrownbill — Jenny Symington (@jcsymington)…
Representing lives from the archive of White Australia
Sophie Couchman, Tim Sherratt and I are presenting a session on ‘Representing lives from the archive of White Australia’ at Framing Lives: 8th Biennial Conference of the International Auto/Biography Association on 19 July 2012. Panel description This panel offers three approaches to…
Something Australian at WCILCOS 2012 (Vancouver, Canada)
In a bit over a week, I’ll be heading (a long way) north to the 5th WCILCOS International Conference of Institutes and Libraries for Chinese Overseas Studies in Vancouver, Canada. The conference theme is ‘Chinese through the Americas’, but there…
‘That famous fighting family’
A little article of mine* appears in issue 9 of Inside History magazine (March–April 2012). The article discusses the experiences of Chinese Australians during World War I through the experiences of the Sam family from West Wyalong, New South Wales….
Ah Yin family of Adelong, c.1897
Every time I poke around in series NAA: SP42/1, I find something new and interesting that I hadn’t noticed before. Today’s find is a photograph of the family of Ah Yin (or Ah Yen), who was a storekeeper at Adelong…
Seeing the women and children
I’ve been thinking further about the possibilities of Tim’s wall of faces as a finding aid, as something to help both locate archival documents and to understand their context. The series we used in our test (ST84/1) was one in…
The real face of White Australia
In October 1911, the Sydney Morning Herald published a short article under the headline, ‘An indignity: photographs and finger-prints’. The article discussed the situation of Charles Yee Wing, a wealthy and respected Sydney businessman, who had asked to be exempted…
Birth certificate registers
In October 1913 Secretary of the Department of External Affairs, Atlee Hunt, sent a circular to the state Customs departments asking if they kept records of Chinese Australians who used their birth certificates as identity papers when travelling overseas. Queensland…
Form 21(i): Certificate of Domicile, 1902
This is the first in a series of five posts that looks at the different iterations of Form 21 over the first decade of the 20th century. Form 21 is better known as a Certificate of Domicile or Certificate Exempting…