The term ‘triangulation’ was used to describe what many regard as basic research — checking and double checking information. As Pat Weller put it, when there were two in the room, if you can, ask both what happened. Political scientists (and others) should stop using jargon. Simple English will suffice. Indeed, the term ‘triangulation’ is far better known to political scientists as being the term used by Clinton adviser Dick Morris to explain his policy of urging Clinton to distinguish himself from congressional Democrats as well as congressional Republicans (Morris 1999).

Ian Hancock noted the wealth of material available in the National Archives of Australia (NAA) on the Liberal Party that seem to have been mined by few. Lenore Coltheart referred to the value of the World Wide Web, and in particular the National Archives’ website devoted to Australian prime ministers and to its ‘uncommon lives’ pages, in particular those for Jessie Street.^[3] The Archives’ collection on Australia’s prime ministers including documents, photographs, sound, films and videotape, and the links to many other collections, is an essential reference source for anyone working on the life and times of the prime ministers. The NAA website is a virtual nod in the direction of the American presidential libraries, which have spawned so many great (and not so great) biographies. Nicholas Brown spoke of what will be an outstanding contribution to the study and writing of Australian biography, the project to publish the Australian Dictionary of Biography Online in fully searchable form with links to other archival and bibliographical resources.

Neal Blewett wrote about the debate in Cabinet in July 1992 concerning the destruction or retention of the notebooks used by Cabinet Office staff who attend Cabinet meetings and prepare the minutes. The notebooks are now permanently retained, but unlike most Commonwealth records are not available until 50 years have elapsed.

On a personal note, when the Archives Bill 1983 was being drafted, I together with George Nichols — the then First Assistant Secretary, were among the cabinet officers arguing that the notebooks should be brought within the provisions of the proposed legislation and permanently retained. Perhaps not coincidentally, we both had degrees in history. Our view did not prevail. That Bill did not refer to the cabinet notebooks. Their existence continued to be, if not a secret, not publicised. However, early in the 1990s the view strongly argued by several senior officials (in both the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet and the NAA, where Nichols was Director-General) that if the notebooks were not brought under the Archives Act there was a real risk that some day there would again be attempts to destroy these valuable records prevailed and their proposed retention went before Cabinet. The Prime Minister and Cabinet (Miscellaneous Provisions) Act 1994 brought the notebooks under the control of the Archives with the 50 year release date. It was a near run thing.

But a word of caution to those slavering at the thought that one day they will be able to access the cabinet notebooks. I doubt that at least some of the entries in the notebooks (assuming they can be read) will tell us more than what is already known through the minutes. In my time in the Cabinet Office (1980s), there were no rules about how and what was to be recorded in the notebooks. Each note taker made such notes as he or she thought would be useful when writing the minutes.^[4]

In A Cabinet Diary Neal Blewett tells how he had deliberately refrained from any consultation of the cabinet notebooks in writing his diary. He would have had access to the cabinet submissions and minutes at the time. There is a convention that former ministers may ‘refresh their memory’ of the cabinet records they saw when in office when writing their memoirs. That access used to be generously granted, although the letter Blewett read to the workshop, written to him by Max Moore-Wilton, at the time Secretary of the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, suggests that access may in more recent years have been less readily available.

Before leaving the subject of cabinet records, I offer one further personal anecdote. When I was a cabinet officer, Peter Edwards had recently been appointed the Official Historian of Australia’s involvement in Southeast Asian conflicts. He had been granted unrestricted access to cabinet and departmental records. One day, while Peter was sitting in the Cabinet Office tapping away at a manual typewriter, staff were cleaning out the large walk-in vault where the records were kept. They found on a back shelf an envelope that had been sealed by Sir John Bunting, Cabinet Secretary from 1959-75. That envelope contained the original correspondence between the Australian and other governments concerning our entry into the Vietnam War. There may have been no other copies of at least some of this correspondence, which was promptly copied and made available to Edwards. The originals were despatched to the Australian Archives.

Since the advent of the Freedom of Information legislation and e-mail, the biographer and historian of the future will find the written records of the public services very sparse in contrast to the records before, say, the 1970s. The ubiquitous detachable yellow post-it notes are a boon to the public servant concerned with a future FOI request, but a curse to the researcher.