Research blog

TUTA and ACTU leaflets in the Federated Furnishing Trade Society of Australasia files
Noel Butlin Archives, Series N98
Renee Burns and Alice Garner working through archives boxes looking for material on trade union education at the Noel Butlin Archives, Canberra
The National Archives of Australia in Canberra on a winter’s day in May.

Mining for archival gold in Canberra

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 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!

Digging into the archives helps us to build a more complete picture of how TUTA was established and how it operated, how trainers, administrators and course participants understood their work and their learning, the challenges they faced and how these changed over the decades of TUTA’s existence.

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.

As well as spending time in the Noel Butlin Centre, and while Renee continued to plough through the boxes, 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.

Fortunately, when travel has been impossible, as it has been for most of the life of this project, we have ordered digital copies of selected NAA records, a lifeline for the project through the long lockdowns. The advantage of consulting on-site is that 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.