The Copley Health Archive: An Annotated Catalogue of the Newspaper Cuttings (October 2025)

Merv and Janet Copley were a Newcastle couple devoted to the communist cause and active in community and union affairs.

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 newspaper cuttings about health and medical matters are held in archive boxes CO87 to CO93 in the University of Newcastle Auchmuty Library Special Collections, as The Merv and Janet Copley Collection. Various brochures, notices and pages torn from copies of 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 Newcastle and Hunter Valley newspapers, the Sydney Morning Herald and the Australian, with the appearance other papers such as the Whyalla Argus, the West Australian, the Tribune and the Financial Review from time to time.

There are no cuttings in 1953 for January to March (inclusive), or in 1957 from June to December (inclusive), and there were very few in 1962. Merv Copley was travelling during those times, or they may have been lost.

The Copleys’ collection of newspaper clipping referencing drug and the pharmaceutical industry are held in Box CO61 and have been the subject of a separate annotated catalogue.

THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THESE CUTTINGS

The Copleys’ choices of what-to-clip was selective, and was not representative of even the local newspaper articles of the time. Consequently, no reliable quantitative analyses of the articles in
this archive will be possible, but qualitative considerations may be useful.

The cuttings are of historical interest because the Copleys began collecting them in 1953, the year of the passage of The National Health Act that determined the structure of Australia’s health system for the following two decades. It was based on fee-for-service for medical care and hospital care and on honorary doctors working in hospitals, and it was supported by voluntary health insurance, reflecting the liberal political philosophy of the time characterised by the valorisation of individual responsibility and of the markets; these cuttings describe how this system became increasingly unpopular over two decades. Of interest also is the cuttings’ detailing of the importance of hospitals to their communities.

Copyright David Smith 2025