National Archives: Once the past is gone, it's gone

I can attest that Frank was of "sterling character" because he is the Italian-born grandfather - "Nonno" - after whom I was named. Some called him "hard", by which they meant tough. He was famously strong, but I recall him mainly as kind and gentle, although wilful. When my parents were exasperated, they said "pig-headed". He died in 1979, when I was 10.

Frank came to Australia on the Regina D'Italia in 1927. His statutory declaration tells me that this dark-haired native of the Aeolian Island of Lipari, off the coast of Sicily, was five feet and seven inches tall, and had grey eyes. He had been born on June 4, 1901.

The National Archives also tell me that he lived at Albert Park for a year and a half when he first came to Australia. That's news to me: I'd always assumed he lived all his Australian life in Northcote - or Croxton, as we called the cluster of businesses and houses adjacent to the famous old Croxton Park Hotel.

By 1940 he was married to Anna, who was 33. They had two children: my uncle, Robert (Bob) and my mother Angelina (Angie). In his declaration, Frank said that he intended to settle in Australia, and attested that he had not applied to retain his Italian citizenship, and nor did he intend to do so in the future. He declared: "I am not connected with any society or organisation, who have treasonable or disloyal activities against the Commonwealth government of Australia."

The report on his application is mainly unexceptional. "Nothing adverse recorded" was the response to his wartime conduct. The kicker comes at the foot of the document: "Military authorities object to the grant of this application on the grounds of being an enemy alien of military age." Frank's application had come too late, and he and his family spent the war as enemy aliens.

This is where the documentary record mostly ends, and a different kind of family history - one carried in stories told across generations - begins. But family stories are fragile; they might last if our own memories can pass them on, unless we choose to record them in writing or on tape - or now, in digital files. Many of my family's are already lost; I carry a few in my head. I have in my collection of family papers a school assignment I wrote on enemy aliens during the Second World War, based on stories told to me by family members - although by then, my grandfather was dead.

Now the Australian public is getting a lesson in another kind of fragility: the fragility of archives. The recent statement by Senator Amanda Stoker, the assistant minister responsible for the National Archives - that "time marches on and all sources degrade over time" - spooked a lot of people who use them. It's one of those remarks that is literally true, yet deeply worrying when coming from a government that sat for more than a year on a report that diagnosed the problem and recommended ways of alleviating it.

It's hard to imagine any other self-respecting nation treating its national records in such a way.

"The Magna Carta is indeed a document of great importance to us," said the Attorney-General, "but all sources degrade over time, and after all, there are three other copies."

"We do take the Declaration of Independence seriously," said the White House official, "but all sources degrade over time and people can always look it up on the internet."

And indeed, they can: and that is why the task of digitising the National Archives' most fragile records is such an urgent one. Paper records are at risk, but it is the film and the sound that are causing most concern. These are disintegrating and, if left alone much longer, will be lost forever.

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A group of 150 historians and writers who care about archives recently wrote an open letter to the Prime Minister expressing their fears and calling for funding. The effort was led by Graeme Davison and Gideon Haigh, two distinguished Australian authors and historians. Reports suggest the government is listening, but there are no promises of funding as yet.

After the Second World War ended, my grandparents were naturalised and Frank lived the rest of his life running his business in Croxton. His son ran it after him. Anna lived until 1996, having worked in the business into her late 80s.

I have a set of cards produced by the Darebin Ethnic Communities Council, one of which features my Uncle Bob recalling "We were not allowed to have a radio" during the Second World War. Bob would have been 12 when the war ended, and it was that deprivation that stuck in his mind decades later, as it had in my mother's.

Unsurprisingly so: most of their relatives - the naturalised ones - and their friends would have had a radio. It was a place where that generation told and heard its stories. Stories are powerful; losing access to them, or the ability to tell them, can be painful.

But historical stories depend on records. The past has no existence in the present. Once it's gone, it's gone.

History does leave traces that help us reimagine it. Some of those traces disappear on bodily death. Others are passed on to those who survive us, as stories. Some are in landscape; they can be seen in the buildings that survive above or below the earth, and in country itself, sometimes stretching back millennia. Or the traces might stretch back a few decades and be found in archives and libraries.

As one of the letter's signatories, Michelle Arrow, recently remarked, original records do not have back-ups - unless we make them. That's the challenge we now face. Our descendants will judge us - and our governments - for the choices we make.