Archive
PJ Keating Personal Archive Collection 1969-2025
The PJ Keating Personal Archive Collection comprises a scanned newspaper collection and a digitised audio-visual collection collected by Mr Keating over a fifty-six-year period from 1969 to 2025.
The newspaper collection comprises some 14,000 individual pages collected personally by Mr Keating, which he cut or removed from capital city newspaper editions to record that which, on relevant days, he thought to be important to the national story – an historical ribbon picturing the country’s rapid evolution and with it the attendant policy challenges and their resolution or attempted resolution.
Mr Keating collected and collated the now 374 audio-visual VHS tapes and DVDs recording interviews with him or broader stories which either involved him or added to the national story. The tapes were digitised to be included in the archive collection.
What Mr Keating believes is probably unique about the collection is that it was collected with one eye – an eye conscious of pressures in the world, their impact on Australia and of Australia’s needs and remedies as it sought to adjust and prosper.
It is unlikely that the leader of any comparable western nation or indeed, eastern nation, would have assiduously committed time, thought and consideration to conscientiously aggregate material on this range and scale and for over half a century.
And in the half century when newspapers were at their prime with abundant revenues to employ myriad specialist writers in so many fields.
Invariably, on a Saturday, Mr Keating would review the week’s newspaper reporting and decide which items were significant and worthy of retention. He only collected full pages from newspapers to demonstrate and record the placement and weight of news decided by editors. For that reason the collection is devoid of newspaper “clippings”.
In a public life characterised by perpetual action and calls upon time, it is impossible to record by diary the events of a day, let alone that of a morning or even an hour. The motivation for this collection was for Mr Keating to record “markers” in a week of events – particularly events he had superintended either as Treasurer or Prime Minister or events of a general national or international character which insinuated themselves into our national life.
The thirteen years between 1983 and 1996 gave witness to the unprecedented opening of the Australian economy to the world – away from the protectionist model the country had broadly adopted since Federation – the so-called ‘Australian Defence Model’.
Mr Keating saw his task in these years as dismantling the Deakin legacy of economic protection and replacing it with a “competitive” internationalist policy which provided a premium on personal ingenuity, lowering prices through the abolition of tariffs while getting blood to the muscle of the economy by the free flow of capital via open financial markets.
By the early 1990s Mr Keating had fully opened Australia’s financial and product markets while also in the early 1990s introducing enterprise bargaining into Australia’s labour market, turning away from 100 years of regulated national wage setting.
Having given the country a new economic engine, Mr Keating saw his task as Prime Minister to orient Australia towards our neighbourhood, Asia, while at the same time promoting Indigenous reconciliation and land rights at home. This dovetailed with what he believed was our need to sever links with the British monarchy and move to a republic with an Australian as our head of state.
In foreign policy, during a visit by President George Herbert Bush on New Years Day 1992, Mr Keating sketched out a strategic framework which would bring the United States, at presidential level, and for the first time, to an annual head of government meeting which included the Presidents of China and of Indonesia and the Prime Minister of Japan, among others, including ourselves.
The APEC Leaders have now met for thirty-two years; every year around November, since 1992. And these plenary meetings, along with the bi-lateral meetings both before and after, have led to understandings and practical outcomes beyond the scope of the Pacific which obtained before 1992.
Before Mr Keating’s Prime Ministership, the Australian Prime Minister only ever attended two international meetings: the Commonwealth Heads of Government and the South Pacific Forum of Island States.
At the first APEC Leaders Meeting in Seattle in 1992 and in every year since, the Australian Prime Minister and our bureaucracy meet and sit with the people who hold the balance of power across Asia and the Pacific.
Among important excerpts in the collection is the record of the historic mutual consultation and defence co-operation agreement Mr Keating struck with President Suharto of Indonesia in December 1995.
This agreement with our nearest neighbour, the world’s largest Muslim state, drafted with ANZUS like words and phrases but with more definite obligations was, in Mr Keating’s view, the high point of Australian foreign policy in the second half of the twentieth century. Certainly, the highest point since the ANZUS Agreement signed in 1951.
Its point was to co-opt the Indonesian state into a contingent defence of Australia should Australia ever come under threat from another state, including by either China or Japan. Bearing in mind that in 1995, in strategic terms, China was incapable of mounting an invasion of any state, neither near nor far. And Japan at the time, despite its latent capabilities, was complying with the pacifist doctrine articulated by its post-World War II Constitution.
The collection also records and reflects – often comprehensively, the events under the Howard government which followed, and all Labor and Coalition governments since – up to and including the Albanese government.
It also reflects upon items of individual journalism and often with comments by Mr Keating, handwritten at the time, to nominate or amplify a point.
Over the years 1996 to 2025, the collection provides a long continuous ribbon of story recording, storytelling and of comment, including many articles expressly written by Mr Keating, to meet issues which had arisen, or which were particularly relevant at the time.
The PJ Keating Personal Archive Collection consists of two parts: the Newspaper Collection 1969-2025 and the Audio-visual Collection 1974-2025. Both collections have been digitised, in chronological order, onto a hard drive. Within each year, items have an identifying number along with publication title, date, and page number. There are now almost 14,000 newspaper articles in the digitised collection, spanning the years 1969 to 2025.
In respect of the Audio-visual Collection, the original VHS, DVD, CD and USB collection have been deposited with the National Film and Sound Archive. The 374 digitised audio-visual items are filed in chronological order, with each item allocated a unique identifying number.
Digitised collections have been deposited with National Archives Australia, National Film and Sound Archive, National Library Australia, and State Library of New South Wales.
A catalogue of the Audio-visual Collection has been maintained, listing each item in chronological order, providing ID numbers, recording date, title/program, original medium and broadcaster. The catalogue is intended as an aid to locate items of interest.
10 March 2025