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‘Thinking in Papua New Guinean terms’ : The sensitive files case of 1972 and Australia’s migrated archive
Piccini, Jon
Piccini, Jon
Author
Abstract
Australia’s unsuccessful attempt to remove ‘sensitive’ files from the Territory of Papua and New Guinea (PNG) in 1972 adds new insights into emerging literature on the migrated archive. This paper argues that fears of reputational damage, possessiveness and race-based logics animated Australia’s actions. It illuminates how an unlikely alliance of Australian archivists and academics with PNG nationalist elites saw the removals policy reversed, thus ensuring the nation’s colonial era records remained in place. It also demonstrates the migrated archive’s global nature, as well as locating Australia and PNG within the late twentieth-century narrative of empire’s end.
Keywords
Territory of Papua and New Guinea, Papua New Guinea, PNG, Australia, History, colonialism, archives
Date
2023
Type
Journal article
Journal
History Workshop Journal
Book
Volume
96
Issue
Page Range
115-133
Article Number
ACU Department
School of Arts and Humanities
Faculty of Education and Arts
Faculty of Education and Arts
Collections
Relation URI
Event URL
Open Access Status
Published as ‘gold’ (paid) open access
License
CC BY-NC-ND 4.0
File Access
Open
Notes
© The Author(s) 2023. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of History Workshop Journal.
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial reproduction and distribution of the work, in any medium, provided the original work is not altered or transformed in any way, and that the work is properly cited.
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial reproduction and distribution of the work, in any medium, provided the original work is not altered or transformed in any way, and that the work is properly cited.