‘Thinking in Papua New Guinean Terms’: the Sensitive Files Case of 1972 and Australia’s Migrated Archive

Abstract

Australia’s unsuccessful attempt to remove ‘sensitive’ files from the Territory of Papua and New Guinea (PNG) in 1972 adds new insights into emerging literature on the migrated archive. This paper argues that fears of reputational damage, possessiveness and race-based logics animated Australia’s actions. It illuminates how an unlikely alliance of Australian archivists and academics with PNG nationalist elites saw the removals policy reversed, thus ensuring the nation’s colonial era records remained in place. It also demonstrates the migrated archive’s global nature, as well as locating Australia and PNG within the late twentieth-century narrative of empire’s end.