About this archive
DoofHistory.org is an independent community archive dedicated to the preservation of records relating to informal sound-gathering culture in Australia from 1821 to 2021. It was established by volunteers who believed that two centuries of underground cultural practice had been systematically excluded from mainstream historical documentation - not because records did not exist, but because no institution with sufficient interest in their preservation had been positioned to collect them. This archive is that institution. It is not affiliated with any university, government body, museum, or commercial organisation. It does not receive institutional funding. Its content is drawn from community submissions, oral histories, digitised newspaper archives, academic research, and in some cases, materials of uncertain provenance that have nonetheless been deemed worthy of preservation on the grounds that the alternative - their loss - would be worse than the uncertainty of their origins.
The archive acknowledges that a significant proportion of early doof history is, by the nature of the culture, poorly documented. It does not treat this as a reason for exclusion. It treats it as the central challenge of its work. Where claims cannot be verified, they are marked as disputed. Where sources cannot be located, this is stated. Where the archive has made editorial judgements that reasonable people might contest, these judgements are disclosed. The archive is not neutral on the question of whether informal gathering culture has value. It was created on the premise that it does. On questions of specific fact, it attempts neutrality. On the question of whether any of this matters, it does not.
This archive was last updated on 14 October 2021.