The National Library’s website is a beautiful, bright and shiny digital place. Its homepage highlights many of the extraordinary things it lets you do, from applying for the Lilburn fellowship to getting an in-depth look at the Te Tiriti o Waitangi and roaming around the institution’s digitised collections.
One thing you can’t do is access a unique archive of recordings in the Alexander Turnbull Collection made by prime ministers and others in positions of national influence and responsibility since 1984. As reported in the New Zealand Herald, there are now “1500 hours of interviews with 115 different participants”.
They are reputedly of unprecedented levels of candour, having been made on the understanding they would not be available publicly for a long, long time. Researchers who could give very good reasons might be allowed to see a little bit of some of them. But you and I were never meant to see them – at least for the foreseeable future.
What is in there? We have only the barest, tantalising glimpses. Of her contribution, former New Zealand First Cabinet minister Tracey Martin told the Herald, “I do need for a couple of people to die before it gets released, just to save myself from defamation or something.” Tracey, you tease!
History is littered with rumours of what could be out there. What might we have found in Jesus’s autobiography, or Orville Wright’s diary recounting a visit to Richard Pearse’s farm several months before he and Wilbur first took flight?
Several libraries around the world contain material connected to the British royal family which is rumoured to display greater Nazi sympathies on the part of its members than most people would expect.
What then might be in the Turnbull’s oral archives? Confessions of the secret socialist dreams of Jenny Shipley, Don Brash’s admission that he was actually a Chinese spy, or the lost scone recipe of John Key? Perhaps we would finally hear about the angelic visitation that gave the adolescent Winston Peters his sense of destiny. And discover that Jacinda Ardern really was a shape-shifting lizard?
I’m speculating, of course. Admittedly, these interviews might be of interest only to masochistic political studies specialists, but that’s not the point.
The point is that the recordings were made in good faith by the subjects, not just on the understanding that they were subject to a high degree of confidentiality, but also on the understanding that they were part of an ongoing project that would treat their ramblings with respect and care and give us a big-picture, long view of history.
Not part of something that would have the plug pulled with no notice, which is what has happened. There will be no more cosy confidential chats.
There was no official announcement that the project had come to an end. Herald inquiries brought forth the sort of corporate speak about improving your experience and providing a better service that organisations fall back on when they raise their prices and cut their opening hours.
“Bringing the project to a close will allow us to focus our efforts on making the collection accessible to researchers in accordance with participants’ agreements, including completing descriptions of the 5000-plus recordings and digitisation of recordings on audio cassette,” said acting chief librarian Jessica Moran.
Nice for them, but what about Christopher Luxon, Nicola Willis and other political giants (pending) whose insights and obsessions will now be lost to us forever? Did the regular interviewers assigned to the project decide at their weekly WIP meeting that this was a prime minister too far?
Forty years from start to finish is a very small slice of our history and whatever is in those files would make more sense if viewed in a wider context. It would have been good to see, for instance, how relevant Luxon’s current personal views are to the state of the nation in 20, 50 or 100 years.
The National Library of New Zealand is no stranger to accusations of cultural vandalism, as was seen when it divested itself of several hundred thousand books in order to improve its service to us.
Confidentiality is an important tool for researchers, but not sharing information – and actually taking a decision not to acquire information – is really the opposite of what libraries are about.
