[2010.0053] Papers of Bernie Taft

Description

IdentifierUMA-ACE-20100053Extent113 boxesLinear Meteragenot specifiedScope and ContentThe material in this accession covers the period of Taft’s career in the Communist Party of Australia (CPA) until his resignation in April 1984, and traces the next period of his life involved with various other social organisations such as the Socialist Forum, Evatt Foundation, and the Australia Jewish Democratic Society.
The CPA material reflects Taft involvement in various levels of the Party; containing official minutes, agendas, and correspondence of the National Committee, National Executive and Victorian State Committee, and material relating to his role as joint national secretary. Other CPA committee material, such as the Women’s’ committee, is held within these files. A significant amount of Marx School material covering Taft’s personal research and preparatory notes for lectures and discussion groups in his role as director, as well as official course material, compliments documents about Party Education programs.
Of note are official financial documents and documents about CPA property, in addition to Taft’s hand-written notes and ephemeral papers. Speech transcripts and notes, writing for the media and several boxes of drafts and edited copies of his memoir “Crossing the Party Line”.
Taft maintained a comprehensive series of news cuttings during the course of his life. Covering global political events in addition to Australian political, cultural and economic affairs, researchers should use the search term ‘news cuttings’ to locate all instances of these files throughout the collection.
Taft’s involvement in the peace movement in Australia, especially the Victorian branch of the Vietnam Moratorium Campaign, is represented in this accession.
Previous control series and numbers have been assigned to a small segment of material. In the early 2000s a section of material was partly catalogued and given a series title, sometimes accompanied by a control number. Where two series systems exist simultaneously, a previous control series title and Taft’s control series title have both been given, as they sometimes differ. This information is retained in Scope and Content notes for each item.
Where items have a year as title, the archivist has clarified the type of material in []. In these cases, the material was collected in the given year by Taft and is representative of his various commitments and interests in. The year of collection is usually the only affinity, apart from the collector, that the material shares.
Taft also used notes to himself as titles, as well as the term “current”. These titles are usually accompanied by a year, for example, “Historical material 2003”. This does not mean the records were created in 2003, but that Taft is re-viewing them and re-using them in 2003.

For ease of searching, acronyms have not been recorded using periods between letters, for example, ARU (Australian Railways Union), and CPSU (Communist Party of the Soviet Union).Collection CategoryCommunity and PoliticalAccess StatusOpen for public accessRequest Access to RecordsRequest records from this AccessionSearch within this Accession

Provenance

CreatorTaft, Bernie

Dates

Datec.1891-c.2005

Description Control

Previous System ID2010.0053State of ListPart listed

University of Melbourne Archives

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[2010.0053] Papers of Bernie Taft