Margaret's Century of Archiving

0:00It's March 29th. Sydney News Today starts now, AI-powered and ready. I'm Cory with the story. Staff at the State Library of Western Australia just threw a big party for Margaret Medcalf hitting her 100th birthday. This legend started in the archives, back in 1955, after getting hooked on record, keeping at the Australian Embassy in the Hague during. Indonesia's push for independence from Holland. She dedicated decades to hunting down and saving the state's key documents from government offices, closing businesses, and even family addicts. Her team worked under strict rules, notestroying records without the state archivists okay. They'd sift through piles item-by-item, traveling everywhere, including the goal fields for old mining files. Margaret pushed hard to preserve what mattered, even vacuuming dusty boxes and dealing with surprises like a set of false teeth. One huge win was saving welfare records from the 1920s to 60s, nearly 20,000 files on microfilm, despite pushback to trash.

1:00Them. Those letters about food aid turned out vital for Aboriginal folks, tracing family roots, and now they fuel daily use in family history projects, the National Redress Scheme, and Western Australia's stolen generation's efforts. Current archivists say she downplays her impact, but senior archivist Damian Hassan credits her directly for making that support possible. Then after retiring in 1989, Margaret stays sharp, grilling the state librarian on details and keeping that community focus alive. Folks gathered in the archives for her centenary bash, with old colleagues calling her a forgiving mentor, who never missed a beat. At 100, she still loves being surrounded by those stacks, feeling right at home in the records she fought to keep.