Reconstructing changes in the Great Barrier Reef - The Great Barrier Reef: An Environmental History - page 24

in the annual reports of those departments, published in the QPP and the QVP .
Information about the Great Barrier Reef could be contained within the reports
of any department, in any year, because diverse activities such as mining, coconut
palm planting, dredging and tourist infrastructure development were administered
by different departments. Therefore, many departmental reports were sampled,
and many reports were searched systematically and comprehensively, for
references to the Great Barrier Reef.
The collection of data from government records, therefore, represented both
a longitudinal study of the activities of individual departments, from year to year,
and a cross-sectional collection of materials across departments for the same
year. This method allowed data to be found in the years that responsibility for
their collection was transferred from one department to another. In addition to
the annual reports, reports of governmental debates and proceedings (for the
Queensland Government) were published in the QPD , and export statistics
for various products - such as tortoise-shell - were obtained from the SCQ and
the SSQ . The QPD , however, were consulted for additional material on key
activities in the Great Barrier Reef, but they were not searched exhaustively.
Parliamentary reporting procedures suggested that the major events involving
Queensland Government departments would be reported primarily in the
QPP (and in the QVP , prior to the formation of the State of Queensland, in
1901) and those documents represented the most comprehensive source of data
about departmental activities. Data from all of those records, in addition, was
supplemented by the unpublished government records sourced from departmental
offices and the QSA (see below).
Over the period 1860-1960, the reporting procedures of Queensland
Government departments changed significantly and the organisation of
departments altered; some, such as the QDHM and the QDNA, ceased to exist
during that period. The records available in the annual reports are neither
continuous nor consistent; they were intended primarily as political, not
scientific, documents. Consequently, the recording and interpretation of data
found in government reports requires caution, and is sometimes unsuitable for
use in reconstructing environmental change. In particular, longitudinal data
series contain many disjunctions. For example, in some years the reporting of
total annual catches of green turtles by weight included both shell and shell
meat combined; in other years the weights of shell alone were reported. Another
example is the reporting of coconut palm planting, which omitted detail for
the earliest plantations. Such anomalies support McLoughlin's (1999) findings
that major omissions and inconsistencies occur in official dredging records. Yet
government records provide valuable insights into the activities of Queensland
Government departments and a source of data that, in some cases, represents the
only surviving record of particular human activities in the Great Barrier Reef.