NRS-17477 | Minutes [Grafton City Council]

Full description

This series consists of minutes of the General or Ordinary meetings, and Special or Extraordinary meetings of the Council of the Municipality of Grafton (1859-1885) and City of Grafton (1885-2004). These minute books were created under s.67 of the Municipalities Act of 1858, (22 Vic No.13) which was assented to on 27 October 1858, and subsequent legislation. The General meetings were called for Ordinary business and were recurrent meetings prescribed by legislation to be held at regular intervals. Special meetings could be called for Extraordinary business by the mayor or by two councillors and dealt with a specific issue. Reports were generally also tabled at these meetings as well as at the general meeting relating to the subject. Though many of these volumes are labelled Ordinary minutes, Special meetings are included.

In the 1960s a sequence of volume numbers was applied retrospectively, omitting the first 34 volumes (also labelled 'C' for council, to distinguish them from other minutes sequences). Later this was abandoned in favour of meeting dates and annual numbered minute ranges. These temporary office conventions have not been used as archives references.

The chronology of some volumes is reversed (earliest meeting at the back). From the 1920s each minute is brief and contains numerical references to office systems where the full documentation was filed, condensing some meetings to a single page. From mid-1983, the papers tabled at the meeting begin to be bound with the minutes. These include agenda, correspondence, reports, and minutes of committees. As a result, most later volumes contain only a single meeting. Where original committee records are not held, it may be possible to discover their proceedings after 1983 by tracking their submission to council. [Note: the date range given for the volumes is that of the council meetings at which the papers were tabled, not the dates of these duplicates.]

These volumes are not indexed.