Alice Garner
After having been locked out of all archival institutions throughout the CoVID closures of 2020-21, Renee Burns and I grabbed the chance when things opened up (briefly!) to travel to Canberra for a week in May. We consulted essential archives on TUTA, at the Noel Butlin Archives Centre at ANU and the National Archives, where we found a goldmine of materials on trade union training. Working at pace, calling up hundreds of boxes over the 5 days we had, we scanned as much as we could, taking brief notes along the way.
Highlights from the archives included:
•Correspondence in the pre-TUTA years between ACTU education committee members about what union education could or should look like
•Research files on overseas union training schemes
•Discussions and papers on paid leave for trade union training
•Reports on TUTA courses by participants, including by international unionists
•Course materials from the national (Clyde Cameron College) and state TUTA centres
•Metalworkers’ training course materials
•Enrolment lists for national courses – helpful for locating former TUTA participants!
Handy tip: For anyone contemplating a visit to the Noel Butlin archives, make sure you get in touch well before your visit because they will be able to help you identify records that may not be visible in online inventories.
On day 4, while Renee continued to plough through the boxes in the Noel Butlin Centre, I visited the National Archives to consult documents including Cabinet papers on amendments to the TUTA Act, documents relating to the 1977 Inquiry into Trade Union Training, originals of Clyde Cameron’s correspondence with Prime Minister Whitlam, Treasurer Bill Hayden and other ministers to obtain funding for the national training college (built in Albury Wodonga and named the Clyde Cameron College), records and correspondence relating to a course run for trade unionists from the Philippines, and an expenditure review not long before TUTA was shut down.
It is possible to order digital copies of NAA records – a lifeline for the project through the long lockdowns – but some files are very thick and full of duplicates and when we only want a few pages it’s much more efficient to look through the boxes in person and only scan the important documents.
Also, historians like to look at the real thing, so the short stint with the actual boxes was exciting after so much time sitting in front of screens over the life of the project.
There is plenty more to be found in the National and Noel Butlin Archives but the other part of being a historian is knowing when to stop hunting and start processing and analysing the material. This is the stage we are at now, and we look forward to sharing findings over the coming months.