Inside the Town Clerk's Office
The Town Clerk was the chief executive of the City Council. On paper, the task of the Town Clerk was to direct the Council staff to put into practice the wishes of the elected Council. Gossip magazine Table Talk joked that William Valentine McCall, appointed in 1923 after the death of his predecessor, “suffers, as must any Town Clerk, from the strain of always having to agree with the Lord Mayor.” But Melburnians knew, thanks to a succession of Town Clerks who had become prominent public figures in their own right, that the Town Clerk held one of the most powerful positions in the City of Melbourne - perhaps even more powerful than the Lord Mayor.
One of the main practical responsibilities of the Town Clerk was to handle incoming and outgoing correspondence to the Council, as well as correspondence between Council departments. Of course, this was also a way for the Town Clerk to keep an eagle eye on the inner workings of the municipal bureaucracy. The Town Clerk’s office processed around 7000 items of correspondence in 1925 - an inward letter every fifteen minutes of the working day. Most needed to be referred to other Council departments or to meetings of Council committees, and decisions made before a reply could be sent. Many would subsequently generate dozens or hundreds of pages of further correspondence.
The correspondence below is a routine file, dealing with the salary of one of the office's junior clerks: an insight into the internal workings of the Town Clerk's office.
To handle this growing stream of paperwork, Melbourne’s Town Clerks developed an elaborate filing system. Once, letters had been simply sorted into folders based on their topic: from abattoirs to zoological gardens. From about 1910, a far more sophisticated system was used, so that letters could be retrieved by date, by topic, or by the name of their sender.
To learn more about the filing system, and find your own 1925 stories, head to the Subject Index next.
Acknowledgements
- Text and annotations: Patrick Gigacz