We asked Alex, one of our Parliamentary Information and Records Officers some questions about his work with the Parliament of NSW.  Here’s what he told us:

What is the role of the Information and Records team? 

Over 200 years NSW Parliament has gathered tonnes of information from the first census recorded in the 1800 Settlers Muster Book to digital records of day-to-day business. The information and Records team manages the use of all this from retrieving requested material, managing the digital storage system and exploring the archive to properly index what is actually there.

Could you describe a typical day in the life of a team member?  

I could be helping someone use our Digital Asset Manager (basically a complex version of Google Drive), retrieving a physical record like a video tape that has been requested to be digitised and then this year I got to be a part of the historical research team for the Bicentennial project of the Legislative Council. This project has given me the freedom to do deep research into various sections of Australian history.

What kind of background / qualifications / attributes do team members need to have?  

There’s a growing horde of information in the world, a growing need to make it useful and a growing interest in the past so a love of history, some creativity and any degree recognised by the Australian Library and Information Association (ALIA) should set you up well. Many organisations are now rushing to meet what the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia has called “Deadline 2025” where many physical mediums like microfilm and magnetic tape are beginning to degrade and the technology required to use them is vanishing. Who owns a video tape player these days?  

Your role this year has involved research into the parliamentary archives for the bicentennial celebrations of the NSW Legislative Council. Can you tell us a little bit about the stories you discovered? 

Working on the Bicentennial project has been great, especially stories from the Early Colony around the 1800-1850s. For example, there’s the terror of Governor Ralph Darling (ever heard of Darling Harbour?) who imprisoned some of his own unruly soldiers and mistreated them so badly that one died. The Governor was blamed for the death, and this led to the controversial court case of “Sudds & Thompson” in the 1820s. On the other hand, there’s the story of John Oxley (ever heard of Oxley Highway?) who was one of the first British explorers who chose the location for many of NSW’s early towns and spent his entire life in search of an inland sea which he believed lay inside Australia. Oxley’s theory was that he had surveyed many lakes which he had not been able to trace to the coastline and so he figured they must be flowing to an internal sea within the continent. Spoilers, but he was wrong.

But best of all was researching the local newspapers of regions like Lismore and discovering the large impact lesser-known people had like Eldred Eggins who was an early member of the Legislative Council and was involved in introducing a new drought resistant grass crop to NSW. Some farmers say it’s a great crop, others say it ended up ruining large tracts of land, but I never got enough time to research further. There are many unexplored stories like this. If you ever get bored, try typing a few search terms into Trove and see what you find as they have digitised most of NSW’s pre 1950s newspapers and every page has a story like this.

What do you love about working at Parliament House? 

It’s a building filled with a lot of potential energy. There’s a buzz where it feels like something’s about to happen if not today then maybe tomorrow.