Recent accessions

The ANU Archives recently received a small collection of material from the estate of Miss Joan Duffield (1910-2014). The donation includes early photographs of Mount Stromlo including the construction of the Director's residence which was completed in 1928 and has recently been restored following the 2003 bushfires. The glass-plate negatives have been digitised and are now accessible from the Open Research repository Miss Duffield was the daughter of Professor Walter Geoffrey Duffield, who was appointed the inaugural Director of the Commonwealth Solar Observatory at Mount Stromlo and held the position from 1924 until his death in 1929. Miss Duffield spent part of her childhood at Mt Stromlo and maintained close ties with the Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics, celebrating her 100th birthday at Mt Stromlo in 2010 and supporting the school with the Joan Duffield Postgraduate Scholarship and the Duffield Chair in Astronomy in honour of her father.

The papers of Della (Kondelea) Elliott (1917-2011) have come to the Noel Butlin Archives Centre to join those of her husband Eliot Valens Elliott, General Secretary of the Seamen's Union of Australia from 1941 to 1978. Della was politically active from a young age in a variety of left-wing organisations: she joined the NSW Branch of the Federated Clerks' Union in March 1936 and by 1943 was Assistant Secretary, the first woman in the union's history to hold high office. She pursued the issue of equal pay for women in particular as a delegate to the NSW Labor Council, an ACTU delegate in 1945 and1947, an executive member of the Trade Union Equal Pay Committee chaired by Jessie Street and through the Union of Australian Women. Della then worked for the Waterside Workers Federation in charge of its office and as secretary to General Secretary Jim Healy. From 1955 until retirement in 1988, Della worked for the Seamen's Union of Australia, administering its federal office in Sydney and editing the union's monthly Seamen's Journal.