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Guide to the Archives of Science in Australia - Records of Individuals

The archives of science, in which we include the records of technological and medical research, comprise materials in many different formats and information recorded on many different media. This guide locates and briefly describes the records created by individuals who have worked in Australia, from the earliest explorers and navigators, through the natural historians of the nineteenth century, to the physicists, chemists and biologists of the early twentieth century and the computer software developers of the 1980s. Due to the nature of archival collection, most of the records listed are concerned with the period up to around the end of the Second World War. Some collections are treasure troves, containing personal and professional materials that document the networks created by scientists, their battles with authority and with each other, and their cooperation to achieve longer term objectives; and they provide lasting evidence of the progress and processes of science in Australia.

This guide is not a comprehensive listing of all records of individuals relating to science in Australia. Rather, it is intended to lead the reader to the major sources of archival information relating to science that are held in Australia in institutions other than the Australian Archives and the archival bodies of the various state and territory governments. While we have attempted to include all major collections, inevitably, due to lack of resources, we will have missed some records and perhaps left out some archives and libraries. We have, however, tended to be inclusive rather than exclusive so that the researcher will find many pointers and clues to possibly rich sources that we have not been able to include in detail. For example, even though we have not been able to do a comprehensive survey of the holdings of the Australian Archives, we have included a few references to collections of which we are aware to indicate the type of material to be found there. Likewise, we were not able to do a thorough survey of the holdings of the extensive CSIRO Archive, but we have provided a range of entries to guide the researcher.