Bringing-Them-Home-Report-Web

Little effort has been made to identify all files which are of relevance to Indigenouspeople affected by forcible removal. Thus ‘[a]t this stage, no government is able toprovide comprehensive information on which records still exist and may be relevant topeople tracing their families’ (Families on File page 20).Old records are fragile. The more people touch them the more they riskdisintegration. Preservation is a particular concern but it is costly and resource-intensive.The best preservation method seems to be copying the pages onto microfilm. NSWArchives has begun a project to microfilm the Aborigines Protection Board records itholds.Location of recordsRecords relevant to forcibly removed children and their families – records whichcould assist searchers to discover their true identity, to locate family members and tobegin the process of reunion – were usually created by a range of records agencies:protection boards, police, welfare departments, adoption agencies, educationdepartments, hospitals and missions among others. While older government recordswhich have survived are usually physically located in an archive, they are still owned bythe department which created them or its successor. Access to most records is byarrangement with the agency which created the record.This fact, coupled with the fact that the searchers were babies and children in theperiod for which they seek records – and therefore typically unaware of all the authoritieswho dealt with them – means that the search task is daunting at best, impossible tocontemplate at worst.There is no ‘one-stop shop’ in which all the personal information held generally bygovernment can be located and accessed.There is no single, comprehensive, national database or index that provides information aboutwhat archives are held by which organisation and where. Consequently, researchers need to askthemselves which governments, organisations, or people, have had involvement in any particularevent or activity. Then the researcher needs to approach the organisations (or their archives) toestablish whether the records are extant, where they might be, whether they are accessible and soon. This may require a deal of searching, and deduction and can be quite daunting and frustrating(Australian Archives submission 602 page 19).In terms of information about the history of Western Australia, there has not been anycoordinated approach or any arrangements that actually could bring together all the information… there has not been any coordinated approach to actually manage the records in … a way thatwill serve the interests of the community (Cedric Wyatt, WA Aboriginal Affairs Department,evidence).The range and complexity of the records of relevance to separated families makeindexing a prerequisite to genuine accessibility. Often there is no index at all to assist asearcher to locate a relevant record in a series. Indexes created at the time were morelikely to be meaningful to the officers then than to Indigenous searchers today. The size