The Australian National Archives have been neglected to the point where priceless historical material is close to falling off a ‘digital cliff’. And the ‘defenders of western civilisation’ on the right don’t seem to care.
A nation without history, the poet A.D. Hope called us, but he didn’t intend it as a programmatic statement. Coalition governments have fixed that.
Despite the investigations, the exposes and the Tune report, there remains a mystery around the genuinely shocking neglect by and of the Australian National Archives (NA). As news reports have made clear, the archives appears to have allowed itself to approach a “digital cliff” in which large amounts of material in the form of old tapes, film and the like are hitting the point at which they dissolve into their elements.
The report by David Tune on the NA’s woes put forward a figure of $67 million required to catch the place up to its digitisation and preservation requirements. In the most recent budget, the government gave it nothing for this — zip, zero. This despite the fact that more public-facing institutions such as the National Library all got specific new allocations.
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