Archives are records that are permanently kept for legal, administrative and cultural purposes. They are generally unpublished, and they support most historical research.
Archives New Zealand
By far the largest and most significant repository in New Zealand is Archives New Zealand, Te Rua Mahara o te Kāwanatanga (formerly National Archives), which is responsible for holding all government archives.
Archives New Zealand in Wellington holds key documents, including:
- signed copies of the Treaty of Waitangi
- the archives of the New Zealand Company, which began organised colonisation of New Zealand
- the archives of Parliament
- commissions of inquiry documents
- most higher court records
- the archives of government agencies and the armed forces.
Branches in Auckland, Christchurch and Dunedin hold government archives from their respective regions. In 2013 the total holdings comprised more than 4 million records.
Most long-established local authorities have their own independent archives.
National duty
Some lone voices in the 19th-century archival wilderness spoke out for better treatment of the nation’s records. In 1890 scholar and political reformer Edward Tregear wrote: ‘the literary collection [of our records] is a national duty … which, if we neglect, we shall earn the well-deserved opprobrium of those to whom forgetfulness of national welfare in the individual pursuit of wealth will not appear to be the end and aim of human existence.’1
Slow start
Although Britain had formal archives legislation from 1838, and Canada from 1912, New Zealand was slow to provide for the safekeeping of its official records.
From 1906 various makeshift arrangements were entered into, but real progress only came with the appointment in 1926 of Guy Scholefield as controller of the Dominion Archives. Further momentum was provided by the establishment of official war archives in the Second World War and in the aftermath of a disastrous 1952 fire in the Hope Gibbons building in Wellington, which destroyed many important records.
Archives Act 1957
In 1954 the cabinet approved the establishment of a national archive and the office of chief archivist, and the drafting of enabling legislation.
The Archives Act 1957 established the National Archives within the Department of Internal Affairs. The act covered the records of the executive, legislative and judicial arms of government. It gave the chief archivist sole power to approve the disposal of official records (including their destruction) and the power to require the transfer of records to the archive after 25 years. The act affirmed public access to official archives.
In 1977, by amendment to the Local Government Act 1974, limited protection was extended to local authority archives.
For the first 20 years National Archives was severely hampered by inadequate accommodation and staffing at a time when the responsibilities of government were expanding rapidly. A 1978 report by Wilfred I. Smith (known as the Smith report), commissioned by the recently formed Archives and Records Association of New Zealand, highlighted these and other deficiencies, leading over time to improved accommodation and staffing.
Public interest
Public interest in archives grew from the 1950s – from academic historians increasingly drawn to unpublished sources, local historians and, most of all, from genealogists. There was also increased interest from Māori, who from 1984 would use archival material in claims about historical grievances at the Waitangi Tribunal.
Silenced voices
Archives New Zealand holds the cockpit voice recording tapes of the Air New Zealand flight TE901, which crashed on Antarctica’s Mt Erebus in 1979, killing all 257 people on board. The tapes record the final words of the crew before the plane hit the mountain. Under the terms of the transfer agreement, drawn up when the tapes were given to Archives New Zealand by the Transport Accident Investigation Commission in 1997, no-one can listen to the recordings and it is unlikely that they will ever be aired publically.
Constitutional significance
Increased awareness of the constitutional significance of government archives further highlighted their importance. This was reflected in the passing of the Ombudsmen Act 1975 and the Official Information Act 1982, and the new philosophies of public sector management embodied in the State Sector Act 1988, which was designed to improve government accountability and efficiency.
21st-century developments
In 2000 National Archives became a stand-alone department called Archives New Zealand. With the advent of digital records and the creation of state-owned enterprises, the Archives Act 1957 was well out of date. New comprehensive legislation, the Public Records Act 2005, was passed.
As well as confirming the major provisions of the earlier legislation and extending coverage, the 2005 act empowered the chief archivist to set standards for the creation and maintenance of current records, including digital ones, across the whole of government, with compulsory powers of audit and a mandatory annual report on government record-keeping to Parliament. It also established the Archives Council to advise the minister responsible for Archives New Zealand. The archives provisions of the Local Government Act 1974 were consolidated into the new act.
In 2011 Archives New Zealand was reintegrated back into the Department of Internal Affairs.
