Summary heading

  A373 ASIO correspondence files, Single Number Series

Function and purpose

 The records were created between 1941 and 1948 by three government departments: the Investigation Branch, Central Office, Melbourne and Canberra, the Commonwealth Investigation Service, Central Office, and the Security Service, Central Office, Canberra. The records were inherited by ASIO in 1949. The purpose was to document the function of wartime security.

CONTENTS

The series comprises a range of correspondence in the form of minutes, memos, letters, despatches and cablegrams. Much of this correspondence is between the Army and the Security Service at the level of the Chief of General Staff, the Director of Military Intelligence and the Director or Director-General of the Security Service. In addition, the series contains lists of munitions factories, persons engaged in defence establishments, aliens residing in Canberra, French persons in Australian internment camps, and New Guinea and Papua evacuees. It also holds petitions by Diggers’ associations and various community groups, calling for all aliens to be interned. Some files hold copies of national security legislation, alien control regulations, and alien immigration policy. Others relate to the administration of state branches. The material covers a wide range of subjects within the broad area of wartime security such as, organisations seen as subversive (eg Jehovah Witness), control of aliens, internments, releases and restrictions, visas and passports, security of wharves, ships, seaports and airports, and control of passengers and crews.

Using the series

 All items in this series are accessible through the National Archives database RecordSearch. In some cases, additional information about the subject of the correspondence within the file is provided in a descriptive note attached to the item registration.

Physical characteristics

 The series contains files of varying thickness. The files have been rehoused into acid-free foolscap size folders or wallets and stored within archival quality boxes.

System of arrangement and control

 The records appear to have originated from a number of record keeping systems, with control numbers bearing little or no relation to each other. The control systems that were used under the old systems are variable in format and may consist of a single number, multiple numbers or they may be alphanumeric (eg 18914, 54/482, WP/5445). When the material was transferred into archival custody in 1963-1964, the Archives therefore imposed a single number control system on the records. For reasons not made clear in the documentation, the two series A367 and A373 appear to share a single number control system. This has resulted in each series having considerable gaps in its number system. (For further details see Relationships with other records).

The current arrangement has restored the records in A373 to the original single number system imposed by the Archives in 1963-1964. That is, all registrations now have a single number system, except for one set of control symbols. The exception is control symbol ’1551 Jehovah’s Witness’, which has retained both its 'alphabetical' and its 'part' suffixes. These represent state and subject. For example, 1551B Part 14 denotes: 1551 = Jehovah’s Witness; B = NSW; Part 14 = Children refusing to salute flag. The suffixes have been retained partly because they are meaningful, and partly because they are indexed in CRS 368, which is a name index to CRS A367 and, as it now appears, also index to the 1551 registrations in CRS A373. Another reason for retaining the 1551 suffixes is that the citations may already have appeared in a number of publications. The entries in A368 that refer to 1551 items currently held in A373 are: 1551 = Index to Jehovah’s Witness file; 1551A Parts 1-7 = General; and 1551B Parts 1-29 = NSW. It should be noted that a reference to a file in CRS A368 is by no means an assurance that the item still exists.

Relationships with other records

 As noted above, series A367 and series A373 share a single control system, yet there are discrepancies. In series A367, records created between 1927 and 1953 have a ‘C’ prefix and are sometimes referred to as ‘Correspondence ‘C’ series’. In series A373, the records have been entered into the Archives database RecordSearch without any prefix, even though the accession sheet mentions that the series has been transferred into archival custody, ‘with C prefix from 1946’, and that a ‘C’ prefix appear on a number of individual folios within some files. There is no documentation on file to explain why the two series share a single control number system, but an accession-related note in the A367 series file referring to the ‘C’ series, suggests that “a possible separation and re-listing should be considered”. It is conceivable that this re-listing refers to the records now held in CRS A373, but there is no documentary evidence to support this supposition.

Series history

 In 1963-1964, accessions numbered AA63/75, AA63/82, AA64/26, and AA64/28 were transferred to the Archives by the Security Service, Central Office, Canberra (CA 660). It seems that accessions AA63/75 and AA64/26 were assigned CRS A367, and that accessions AA63/82 and AA64/28 were assigned CRS A373. Research shows that there is some overlap between the two series and, that on one occasion at least, the same control number appears in both series. This is control number 3075: Alien migration policy.