Australian War Memorial Archives

The Australian War Memorial Archives are an awkward cousin of the National Archives. They contain many files from the tactical to strategic levels, war diaries, expeditionary force files captured Japanese documents, and military intelligence files. Related files may be held at the National Archives, and there is no obvious pattern to indicate why one or another archive has a particular set of files. If you are researching the Australian military, you will have to spend time at these archives, which are much less user friendly than the National Archives.

Strengths:

Online Finding Aid System: The War Memorial Archives are searchable on the National Archives finding system. This is a reasonably thorough, intuitive search system with pretty good keyword searching capacity and accurate file descriptions. If you are looking for a particular file, you will be able to discover which archive it is housed at. 

Relaxed: Getting in is easy and involves no metal detector scans or unreasonable hassle.

Weaknesses

No Photography: The archive system feels particularly arbitrary when you arrive here from the National Archives. You are quite free to photograph your documents at the National Archives, not so here! Whether through miserliness or a curmudgeonly local administrator, the War Memorial Archives are an archaic hold out. Photography is not banned for secrecy or privacy reasons, because you are welcome to have their staff photocopy any or all pages for the low fee of $.50/page. This policy also leads the staff to eye you, lest you surreptitiously save yourself a buck or two by snapping a shot with a phone or pocket camera.

Random Collection: The War Memorial Archive holds a mish-mash of files for military historians; some of your files will be here, and others will be at the National Archives. This makes searching inefficient and lucky accidental finds in related files are less likely.