AFFHO Congress - Day 1 Keynotes

The 14th Australasian Conference on Genealogy and History opened this morning.  This triennial event is in Canberra this time, and is being attended by about 550 people. This year, for the first time at one of these conferences, 40 librarians attended a "Librarian's Day" on the day before the conference opened. 

The proceedings commenced with Kerrie Gray, conference convener, welcoming the attendees. She then introduced the Immediate Past President of the Heraldry and Genealogy Society of Canberra (HAGSOC), Rosemary McKenzie, who told us all about the history of HAGSOC. Josh Taylor from Findmypast then told us about some of the recent and upcoming changes to Findmypast.  One of the exciting datasets that should be coming before the end of the year is the 1939 register from the UK, which was taken just before the outbreak of the second world war. As the 1931 census was destroyed in the bombing, and the 1941 census never took place due to the war, this is an important census substitute. This register is being indexed using "intelligent character recognition" which electronically "reads" the handwriting.

Josh Taylor from Findmypast

The keynote speaker, Dr Mathew Trinca, Director of the National Museum of Australia, then spoke on the importance of the stories of ourselves.  He himself was of Italian stock.  His mother was the Australian-born daughter of Italian migrants who arrived in the 1920s, and his father was a migrant himself who arrived shortly before the Second World War when he could see war looming on the horizon. These people's lives were their stories. They had both come from the same little town in the North of Italy near the Swiss border.  Matt's grandfather came out first to find a job and get settled, and then a few years later his mother and her children came out - later more children were born in Australia.

Dr Matt Trinca

Matt's father initially went to Melbourne, then worked in a gold mine in Kalgoorlie.  He kept a nugget of gold from that time and it is from that nugget that Matt's own wedding ring was made.

At university he started to think about his own story set against the past and his mixed Italian & Anglo-Celtic upbringing. He also started thinking about his father's story, and the hardships and prejudice he faced. He then highlighted two books written as migration memoirs.  The first, They're a weird mob by John O'Grady writing as Nino Cullota, approaches the subject from a humourous angel.  The other book he talked about, Romulus my Father by Raimond Gaita treats it in a more serious manner.

Matt made the point that all these stories, especially those about his parents' and grandparents' lives in Italy, help him make sense of who he is. He began to see his own family's past as connected to others. History is as much about the present conditions and preoccupations as it is about the past.  His own family history is closely connected to the pattern of Australia's past which is the history of a series of migrations, both before and after the Second World War.

Matt's Italian-Australian family

He then went onto talk about the "Defining Moments" project being run by the National Museum.  It encourages people to record the stories of people that connect them to the Museum's listed 100 defining moments in history, and acknowledges the connection between the history of a family and the history of the nation.

Strangely, since his talk was all about stories, he didn't encourage us to write down our own stories, or even to contribute to the web site, which would have been a logical conclusion to his talk.

The second Keynote of the day (during the immediate post-lunch session) was Roger Kershaw on Tracing Free Immigrants to Australia. I had attended a talk by Roger in Adelaide at the last AFFHO congress, which I thought was excellent, so had high expectations of this keynote speech.  Sadly I was rather disappointed. Firstly, Roger read the entire speech from notes. Most of the time his head was pointed down towards those notes, not looking at the audience. The keynote speaker in the morning had done the same thing, but his talk was captivating enough that we forgave that. Roger's talk was so full of important and interesting content that it was impossible to be able to write down all the notes I'd have liked to make - especially the references to certain document classes in the National Archives (those references weren't reflected on the slides, which would have made that task easier for me).  Disappointingly, his talk was also rather dry. While I was losing my place in the talk I was hoping that what he was reading was the contents of the paper he had submitted for the proceedings. However when I looked at my copy of the proceedings (on a USB drive) this was not the case.  I think I will probably be able to find the TNA references at least in that paper (which actually looks like it will be excellent and useful), but much of what he said is probably lost to me forever.

In summary, this was an important and interesting talk, that was let down by cramming too much information into a short time and by missing references to the sources of documents on the slides.