How Well Is Labour History Served by Trove?

Abstract

The National Library of Australia’s (NLA) Trove database – and here I am more particularly concerned with its newspaper holdings – is widely and correctly regarded as an outstanding resource for the nation, as well as a means of making vast amounts of Australian material available globally. It is a boon to academic and professional researchers who would once have had to spend weeks and months in research tasks that might now take hours or minutes. It has greatly enhanced community access to resources, allowing family and community historians in far-flung areas open access to collections that would once have been beyond the grasp of all but the well-off: that is, those able to make a trip to Canberra. The spirit of democracy is strong with Trove but, at the same time, it has been chronically underfunded, it is limited in what it offers for the last 70 years, and some kinds of publications are better represented than others. What are the implications of a database that ends for most titles in 1954, for instance, for our understanding of the role of Indigenous people, of women, and of non-British migrants in Australian labour history? So, the question I ask here is: How well is labour history served by Trove? To borrow the theme of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s famous essay, does it allow the subaltern to speak? My purpose is activist as much as expository and analytical. At a time when the Labor government has restored some much-needed funding to national collecting institutions, including Trove, what should the community of labour historians be asking for? What mechanisms should the NLA establish to allow communities, and especially marginalised and under-represented communities, to have their say about what should be included?