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For twenty-three years, from late in 1949 till December 1972, Australian federal politics were dominated by an alliance of conservative parties, the "Liberal" Party of Australia and the Australian Country Party.The Labor Party, which in the mid 1940s had seemed impregnable under leaders like wartime Prime Ministers John Curtin and J.B. Chifley, by the 1950s was in disarray.In 1961 the Australian Labor Party came within a hairsbreadth of gaining office, but it was not until 1972 that a Labor leader, E.G. Whitlam, emerged as one capable of bringing his party back into control of the Treasury benches.In the campaign for electoral support that preceded the December 1972 triumph, Whitlam promised that a federal Labor administration would introduce "Open Government".One of the features of "Open Government" would surely have to be a more liberal approach to the question of access to the nation's archival resources.This was a problem that had bedevilled relations between the Commonwealth Archives Office and scholars ever since attempts were first made to use the public records of the national government for non-official research purposes.When the Commonwealth Archives Office1 first undertook a program of appraising, selecting, arranging and making available for use the public archives of the nation, the 50-year access rule was fairly generally applied in countries adopting British patterns and traditions of administration.In the 1940s this meant that, unless special exceptions were made, no records whatever compiled by agencies of the national government could be consulted, as the six federating Colonies of Australia had not finally come together to form the Commonwealth until 1901.Some older records, it is I The Commonwealth Archives Office began its existence during the later years of the Second World War as the Archives Division of the Commonwealth National Library.Its separation from the National Library is mentioned later in this report.It is now usually referred to as the Australian Archives, and the two terms are used interchangeably in this paper.
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