General comments
- Victorian government agencies dealing with women's issues have only been established in relatively recent times and PROV is yet to receive any significant accessions of records from such agencies. 'Women's issues', particularly in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, were not seen as government responsibilities. Consequently, records pertaining to women's issues are deeply embedded within the record series of a number of organisations and require a degree of ingenuity in order to extract information. One way of doing this is by looking into correspondence file series (and other series) to identify letters written by women's organisations.
- It may be helpful to approach broad queries, such as women's struggle for suffrage and the issue of equal pay (which predate the establishment of government agencies dealing with women's issues), by thinking in terms of organisations - both women's organisations (or agencies) within and outside of government, and agencies within government whose responsibility it was/is to deal with issues relating to women.
- NOTE: If you are approaching women's issues by investigating individuals or organisations and their interaction with government, ask yourself these questions:
- Were there any Commissions, Boards of Enquiry or Committees set up to deal with issues of particular relevance to women?
- Which government department is most likely to have been responsible for the areas these women or organisations were concerned with?
- PROV uses the word 'function' to describe this responsibility. Try limiting your search for the relevant issues to 'function' or 'agency' in PROV's online catalogue. Consult reference archivists in the PROV Reading Room for ideas.
Q: Are you looking for information about non-government women's organisations?
- PROV does not collect the records of non-government organisations. It houses public records as defined in the Public Records Act 1973. Public records are made or received by courts or persons acting judicially in Victoria or by persons employed in public offices. The Act defines a public office as:
- any department branch or office of the Government of Victoria
- any public statutory body corporate or unincorporate
- a State owned enterprise within the meaning of the State Owned Enterprises Act 1992
- any municipal council, and
- any other local governing body corporate or unincorporated.
- If the non-government organisation still exists, it may hold collections of non-current as well as current records. Check with the organisation concerned.
- Non-government organisations sometimes donate their non-current records as archives to the State Library of Victoria or to other institutional archive repositories such as the University of Melbourne Archives. Check with these institutions.
- PROV holds series of correspondence files created by a number of major Victorian government agencies including many of the major departments and statutory authorities. Files in these series document a range of activities including policy development, administrative procedures and the agency's interaction with individuals, non-government organisations and Victorian/other governments. For many of these series, PROV also holds the control records (typically known as indexes and registers) created by the same agency.
In most cases researchers must first use these indexes and registers to establish whether the government agency received letters from non-government organisations and, more importantly, what the government agency did with those letters. (For example, a letter may have been referred to another government agency for action.)
The indexes to many correspondence series (which may be either a separate public record series or a feature that is built into the register) can be used to identify letters received from non-government organisations. For example, the self-indexing register to the Premier's Department for 1943 identifies correspondence under a variety of headings, including Associations, Leagues, Societies, Committees, Clubs and Unions.
- NOTE: These indexes and registers were created by government agencies and reflect the recordkeeping practices of the time. Be aware that these may vary in arrangement over time and from agency to agency. You will need to be both consistent and creative in your approach to checking the indexes and registers. You should also be aware that trained staff are on hand in the PROV Reading Room to guide you through these records.