The Copley Aboriginal Archive: An Annotated Catalogue (May 2025)

Mervyn (Merv) Copley (1914-1978) visited and interacted with indigenous communities. He became disheartened and frustrated at how they were treated, and he kept detailed accounts and diaries. 

In 1993 Janet Copley described how she and Merv worked together. Around 4pm every Friday she took a shopping trolley to the Trades Hall, the Waterboard, the Seamans Union and other Newcastle offices and picked up the week’s daily papers that had been finished with and bought them home. Merv would clip articles and Janet would record the source and the date of the clipping on it in pencil.

Their 2,249 newspaper cuttings about Aboriginal matters are held in archive boxes C002, C003, C004, C005, C006 and C007 in the University of Newcastle Auchmuty Library Special Collections (Archives), as The Merv and Janet Copley Collection. 

Various brochures, notices and pages from Hansard also held in those boxes have not been included in this documentation.

A Listing of the material is here:

radicalnewcastle.wordpress.com/2011/04/07/the-merv-and-janet-copley-collection/

Digitised Selections are here:

livinghistories.newcastle.edu.au/nodes/view/110374

The bulk of the cuttings are from the Australian, the SMH and the NMH, with a greatly increased proportion of those from the Tribune in 1962 and 1963. The relevance of the idiosyncratic method used by the Copleys for obtaining newspapers, and the possibility that they were selective in what they chose to clip, is addressed in Part Two.

Copyright David Smith 2025