Birth, deaths and marriages: we all have them, which is why they should be protected

Why does Victoria’s Births, Deaths and Marriages registry matter? Civil registrations are the most important documents created about you by the state: they certify your existence in time and place, your citizenship, your marital status, your parenthood, your entitlement to inherit. All of these things also affect your partners and descendants.

The state has custody of these documents on your behalf. It is legally bound to preserve them in perpetuity. Just because they may be about people long dead does not make them commodities that can be sold or loaned to commercial organisations, or made vulnerable to identity thieves.

The Victorian government, with advice from Treasury, is investigating the feasibility of moving the service to a public-private partnership to raise funds and improve customer service. Customer service certainly needs reform, but not this way.

The state has obligations to protect our privacy and identity. Currently, the major defence against this is that birth certificates are kept out of the public domain for 100 years. However hungry genealogy entrepreneurs are for new records, the market value of the operation is small, while the historical value is huge.

Victoria’s vital registrations are the historical record, in Victoria’s case, of the colonising people and the people they colonised. Personal events like birth, death and marriage map the movement of people occupying a landscape, their settlement and family formation, their illness and death. We can see communities being built and fading away with change.

We can see waves of immigrants from all over the world and how they fared. They tell of Chinese miners dying of starvation in lonely huts; they tell of epidemics that swept away whole families of children; they tell of former convicts trying to rebuild their lives; they tell of violence and intemperance, madness and sexual delinquency. They show us our past as it was, not as we want it to be.

In Victoria, they also tell of the Indigenous people, dying too soon, removed from country, herded on to reserves, burying their babies and children. They tell of ancient elders born long before the settlement at Botany Bay, seeking refuge on the reserves to die among kin.

We can measure the catastrophic demographic collapse of Aboriginal Victoria, then the gap widening with government policy and continued discrimination. And we can see the recovery of the First Nations over the past three generations.

We can tell this truth by reconstituting the families and communities and applying demographic techniques to estimate the original population and chart the collapse.

Few of the world’s insidious genocides of indigenous peoples are as well documented as ours. Few were as dramatic as the collapse of a population, now estimated to have been from around 60,000 in 1788 to merely 600 by Federation in 1901.

Today, Aboriginal Victoria has recovered, but it comprises only part descendants. And a major reason why that recovery was so difficult can be seen from fertility data. They show that, compared to white women, Aboriginal women suffered high secondary infertility from sexually transmitted diseases, often inflicted on them as young girls by white men. This is colonisation of the human body.

We can read this history in our births, deaths and marriages because, through almost an accident of history, the Colony of Victoria instituted what is arguably the finest civil registration regime in the world. The first registrar was a young English actuary named William Henry Archer. He had been a student of William Farr, the father of the census and civil registration in England and Wales.

Archer was also a member of the London Statistical Society, which had drawn up a template for the ideal registration of civil events. Archer was given a free hand by the colonial government, and it was only in Victoria in 1854 that this template was fully implemented.

Victoria’s records are better than those in England, Wales, Scotland, New Zealand, Canada and the United States. They are more detailed in causes of death and family history and relationships than in any other country.

With AI, we can capture these records to build a genealogy of the people of Victoria and link them to other historical, medical and social sources. This will enable historical demographic reconsitution; population health risk analysis for infectious and chronic disease and intergenerational effects.

It will clarify causation rather than association in genetic population health with historical sibling and cousin observations. It will also advance economic and historical analysis of intergenerational wealth transfer, social mobility and immigration.

This project has been hailed as “our social genome” by the Australian Academy of the Social Sciences in its Decadal Plan for Social Science Research Infrastructure 2024-33. We could call it “Archer”.

We are among the few countries in the world to have the records to build cradle-to-grave data sets of this calibre. We would join the ranks of Sweden, Utah, Quebec and Scotland, while starting from a superior base. Western Australia has done similar linkage in Australia, but has only gone back to 1944.

Our Victorian certificates are heritage assets comparable to the UNESCO-recognised convict archives of New South Wales and Tasmania. Victoria set the standard in Australia from 1854. This astonishingly detailed archive can be de‑identified for the use of researchers both here and around the world.

William Henry Archer would be well pleased to see them curated for the public good in his name.

Janet McCalman received funding from the Australian Research Council between 1998 and 2015 which used these records. Along with colleagues across Australia, she is lobbying for Australia's vital registrations to be converted into a national Historical Record of the Australian People, 1838-1994. She is a member of the ALP.