Geoscience Reference
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the transcribed evidence of Royal Commission inquiries. Therefore, she argued,
no single source of data should be privileged above any other. Despite Ganter's
observations, I made a distinction between documentary and oral sources in
my research, because one intended outcome of the study was an evaluation of
the value of different qualitative sources and methods in environmental history
research for a coastal and marine environment.
Documentary sources include European and Australian written records
describing various aspects of the Great Barrier Reef for the last 150 years,
approximately. The most diverse and abundant of those documents are the
historical topics held in the collections of major Australian libraries and
GBRMPA. Historical topics include both fictional and non-fiction accounts of
the Great Barrier Reef. Many historical leaflets - including tourist literature -
also describe the Great Barrier Reef. Another significant documentary source
is the official Queensland Government reports contained in the Queensland
Parliamentary Papers (QPP), Queensland Parliamentary Debates (QPD) and
Queensland Votes and Proceedings (QVP) ; those documents are held in the major
libraries of Queensland. Export statistics for the early European reef fisheries were
obtained from the Statistics of the Colony of Queensland (SCQ) and the Statistics
of the State of Queensland (SSQ) . A further documentary source is the records of
various Queensland Government departments; those are held in Queensland
Government departmental offices or in the Queensland State Archives (QSA)
in Brisbane. Other documentary sources include national, regional and local
newspapers, which contain journalistic accounts, and various types of manuscripts
(such as the records compiled by individual scientists and naturalists). Some of the
written documentary sources I used are listed i n Table 2.1.
Documentary sources also include visual representations such as historical
photographs, films, video-recordings, maps, posters and sketches. Such materials
can contain evocative images of past conditions of the Great Barrier Reef,
although the significant difficulties involved in their interpretation have
been discussed by Ball and Smith (1992) and by Wachenfeld (1995). Visual
representations are held in the collections of major libraries in Australia,
particularly those with significant historical collections, such as the Mitchell
Library in Sydney. Some materials are held in specialist collections of historical
photographs, maps, films and video-recordings, as, for example, at the GBRMPA
Library in Townsville, where the Historical Photographs Project forms a special
photographic collection (Wachenfeld, 1995, 1997). Many methodological issues
arise in the use of visual representations - especially in the interpretation of
historical photographs - as discussed below. Nonetheless, some images provided
valuable information about historical human activities in the Great Barrier Reef,
including photographs of coral collecting. In some cases, visual representations
are the only surviving sources of data for particular locations or periods. A list of
the visual representations used in my research is found in Table 2.2.
Oral sources comprise spoken materials, often preserved in recorded
interviews and transcripts. They include a range of types of speech: from
 
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