The Press MONDAY, JANUARY 9, 1956. The National Records

Press, Volume XCIII, Issue 27861, 9 January 1956, Page 8

The Press MONDAY, JANUARY 9, 1956. The National Records

We print on this page today a special aiticle by one of our regular reviewers of historical works. He discusses the importance to this country of the early copying, and, if possible, publication of the source material of New Zealand history held in such British repositories as the Public Record Office and the British Museum. The inaccessibility of this material—except at great cost or inconvenience—to historians rznd scholars in this country has long been a matter of concern to the universities and the learned societies; and it is satisfactory, up to a point, to find that a start has been made with the microcopying Gf relevant documents in the English Public Record Office. New Zealand, apparently, has been fortunate enough to share in a project launched by the Australian Commonwealth National Library and the Mitchell Library, Sydney. As the major share of the cost will be borne by Australia, there can be no complaint because Australian historical material will have precedence. New Zealand will have <o wait some years before obtaining copies of the material in the Public Record Office relating to New Zealand up to 1900, and very much longer, perhaps, for copies of material in the British Museum, the missionary societies, and the European archives.

Meanwhile, researchers in New Zealand history will continue to work under a serious disability, which, as the writer of our article makes clear, is no small national loss. New Zealand has been very careless of its historical source material—a fault, perhaps, shared by most young countries. History rarely seems important to those who live close to it. But the European history of New Zealand now spans considerably more than 100 years; and if it is to be seen clearly and in perspective by present-day historians—and therefore by the public —all the facts must be available. Governments in this country have been slow to realise the importance of collecting and safeguarding the sources of the national history; but two disastrous fires within recent years—which destroyed a mass of valuable and irreplaceable scientific records and departmental documents —caused the present Government to take positive steps to collect historical material and to house it adequately. For this important work the staff of the National Archives section of the Department of Internal Affairs is almost ludicrously inadequate, whether measured by thK size and responsibility of the task or by the establishments regarded as appropriate in other countries. But at least a start has been made towards repairing the neglect of decades.