The Lyall Gillespie collection at Hall Heritage Centre includes 40,000 handwritten personal index cards.
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00:00 Squirreled away inside this modest building at the Hall Heritage Centre are over 8,000 Aboriginal artefacts
00:08 collected by Lyle Gillespie predominantly during the 1960s and 1970s.
00:14 However, also housed in this building is a remarkable collection of Lyle's handwritten personal index cards.
00:25 They number over 40,000.
00:27 Volunteer curator of the Gillespie collection, Dr Ken Heffernan, is going to let me have a peek inside.
00:34 We were told in our studies of the collection that these were highly significant
00:42 and that therefore they needed to be looked after better than these drawers.
00:46 So if you look in there, the collection is actually from that drawer is now kept in an archival box.
00:54 There, and each of those is a card about a person.
01:02 And Lyle had this in his back room. I'll just take one at the end there.
01:07 And he used to go and search for things for people who visited.
01:15 And he'd disappear. If you knew him well, he might take you around the back probably.
01:20 But typically what he would do is he'd go around the back and come out with something for you.
01:26 And he'd say, "Ah," and he would obviously have marked the spot in his catalogue.
01:30 So he was very careful of it. And for us, it's a treasure.
01:35 He's been to all these records. And in those days, you couldn't just get a scan or take even...
01:42 you couldn't afford to take a photograph of everything.
01:45 And so he's written everything down by hand.
01:48 Some of the stories about him, so that he could spend most of a day in the archives without going out for a drink.
01:56 So if you've got a relative who was living in Canberra before 1920,
02:04 then there will be a card almost certainly in here related to that person.
02:10 [Music]