Marriage: Love and Law exhibition catalogue - Flipbook - Page 106
FINDING ‘I DO’:
AN ARCHIVIST’S PERSPECTIVE
BONNIE WILDIE
As an archivist/researcher working on the Marriage: Love and Law exhibition
project, I was tasked with finding material within the NSW State Archives
Collection relating to stories of marriage. As accounts and narratives emerged
through letters and registers, films and photographs, Acts and legislation,
the Collection revealed a history in which love and law was entangled.
But the search to find ‘I do’ in the archive was not only a research process,
it became something of a story itself.
When undertaking research in the archive, you build relationships with the
records. Each series – assigned its own unique series number or ‘NRS’ –
is a group of records that has been kept together because of the relationship
that exists between them. The relationship might relate to who created them
or how they were used, but crucially, it is this relationship that exists that keeps
the records together in a series. In accessing the records, you negotiate these
relationships.
There are the record series you know and love. You can get comfortable,
know their ways, understand how they work and the stories they will tell you.
They are series that are reliable, knowable, and that you return to over and over
again. They are the series you can count on. And sometimes, despite knowing
them so well, they can still surprise you.
80
80 Charles, Prince of Wales
Letter to Sir James Rowland,
Balmoral Castle,
5 October 1981
Paper
1981
81 Aborigines Welfare Board
Wedding group
Black and white photograph
ca. 1920s
NSW State Archives,
NRS 30 [4/8566] aperture 8284
NSW State Archives,
NRS 19797 File 1981
81
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