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Welcome to our first edition for 2010 |
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In this issue: Dig up your roots at our 'Shake Your Family Tree' day, read a survivor's account of the HMAHS Centaur, get an insider's look at The Lodge, and add to your dessert repertoire.
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| Shake your family tree |
 Tuesday, 23 February is the Archives’ annual ‘Shake Your Family Tree’ day, a family history celebration at Archives offices across the country.
Learn how to use Archives resources to find your family history, with help from expert historians. Cookery writer Margaret Fulton and Alice Garner, actor and historian, will launch our new book Keeping Family Treasures in Canberra and Melbourne. Other highlights include seminars, repository tours, and collection displays. All events are free.
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| HMAHS Centaur in the Archives |
 268 people died when the hospital ship HMAHS Centaur was torpedoed and sunk off Brisbane on 14 May, 1943. The shipwreck was found in December last year, sparking fresh interest in Queensland’s greatest maritime disaster.
The Archives holds records on the Centaur, including the accounts of some of the 64 survivors in the War Crimes Commission inquiry into the ship’s sinking. You can also view our showcase and Research Guide on another naval war loss, the HMAS Sydney.
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| A capital interior |
 In 1926 the Federal Capital Commission engaged interior designer and ‘Furniture Specialist’ Ruth Lane Poole to furnish new Canberra residences for the Prime Minister and the Governor-General.
A cousin of Irish poet William Butler Yeats, Ruth consulted Ethel Bruce, the Prime Minister's wife, when procuring the best quality Australian and British materials and fittings for The Lodge. The work was demanding, with Ruth required to place and check every order herself.
For more about the Bruces, visit the Archives' current exhbition, Stanley Melbourne Bruce: Prime Minister & Statesman.
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| A White Crow special |
 Lacking a fabulous dessert for that important occasion? White Crow founder Carlisle Francis Longmore may have the answer.
Our 'Find of the Month' charts Longmore’s rise to success with the humble jelly crystal, aided by astute marketing. His promotion of White Crow Jelly Crystals as a sophisticated dessert, nutritious infant food, and restorative for invalids helped make the company a household name in the 1930s.
Check out the 'Beauty Salad' and other recipes here by clicking on the link and selecting 'View digital copy'.
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| Archives enhances its preservation software |
 The Archives remains at the forefront of international digital preservation with the release of XENA version 5.0 in December last year.
The refined software gives users (mostly organisations) greater capacity to preserve digital objects. Originally developed in 2006, XENA (short for Xml Electronic Normalising for Archives) preserves digital records by converting them into open formats.
Freely available via the Archives website, XENA is used world-wide and downloaded up to 1000 times a month.
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| Help solve the mystery |
 Attention enewsletter readers – the Archives would like your help with improving our photograph descriptions. Each month we’ll provide a link to a picture from our collection, and if you recognise the people or places, email us and let us know.
Does this month's mystery picture – a coastal hamlet dating from the 1940s – look familiar? To see the image, click on the link, then click 'View digital copy' and select the 'Enlarge' button to increase the photo size.
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| A new tool to search Memento |
 The Archives has developed the Memento Index, which allows readers to search for photographs and articles published in back issues between 1996 and 2008.
With Memento spanning a broad range of topics – from digital records to high fashion – the index provides a quick ‘go-to’ guide, and reveals the extent of coverage on a particular topic.
Click here to view the latest edition of Memento.
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