To Establish and Affirm Our Collective Identity: Armidale and District Historical Society: Its First Fifty Journals - Their Origins, Purposes, Editors and Foci

Abstract

<p>This reflective if impressionistic survey essay has been quickly penned from the close perspectives of someone who has known all the Society's many editors, has served as an earlier solo editor himself and has attended the delivery of perhaps more of its papers than any other person. It is written also from a personal knowledge of the three key shaping intellectual forces for the <i>Journal</i>:</p><ol><li> the 'New England' formative, community-bonding and adult educational and archive-collecting/using stances of its often forgotten yet shaping, nurturing and long fostering parents;</li><li> the greater-and, to be honest, often lesser-influence of the many Presidents and Committee members on the final choice/compromise selection of papers to be delivered, and, hopefully, to then be published by the Society; and</li><li> the changing positions of inputs from the closely related adult and tertiary culture/education, particularly within the 'region'-one both spatial and intellectual-in relation to the Society's (core of) members/readers of the <i>Journal</i>.</li></ol><p> It is an enduring combination of these sometimes conflicting circumstances that has been largely responsible for: (1) the distinctive nature of the Society and, indeed, of its concern to maintain historical perspective in the remarkably aware general surrounding community; (2) the pattern of content-rich and significant monthly addresses to the Society; and (3) for the selection of the last offerings which would finally appear in the (largely regular) annual <i>Journal and Proceedings</i>, the published historical record of all of the above cultural investigations into both historical change and persisting cultural continuities, as have been conducted by the Society since 1959-1960.</p><p> In the absence of full records of its committee meetings-and so of the preferences/policies enunciated therein-much of the (desirable) substantiation for opinions expressed in this article must depend largely on the simple (simplified ?) versions of the related events to be found in the various Presidents' 'Annual Reports' and in the present writer's own recollections, duly modified by the various suggestions from those other members cited at the end of this text. The official summary of recent and more formal Society activities is usually to be found in the issue of the <i>Journal</i> released at the next year's Annual General Meeting, or soon thereafter.</p><p> To focus first on the obvious organizational patterns in the later <i>Journals</i>, let us list, in anticipation of more specific details, the names of those almost solely responsible early on for its compilation and often indeed for the soliciting of their contents other than the regular papers read to the group.</p>