VPRS 2813 Registers Of Blank Cover References

Full description

The Blank Cover (or B.C.) Registers record information on files referred to the Chief Secretary by various government departments for his opinion. It may be that the term Blank Cover indicated that no notes of departmental action or decision had been placed on the cover placed around the file on which was recorded the date, registration number and subject of the document.

The details recorded in the registers are:

1. The referring department's registration number for the file

2. The name of the referring department

3. From whom the referring department had originally received the correspondence

4. The subject of the referred file

5. Any minutes that the officers of the referring department had noted on the file (usually requests for the Chief Secretary to act on various matters and / or background details on the matter)

6. The Chief Secretary's replies to the minutes and a summary of his actions on the minutes. If the Chief Secretary had further referred the file to an officer of another department for opinion that officer's opinion was also recorded; and

7. The date that the Chief Secretary received the referred file and the date of its return to the originating department.

For the period 1855 to 1862 these inter-departmental referred files were not registered in the correspondence system of the Chief Secretary's Office. The B.C. Registers are the only surviving documentation of these files in the Chief Secretary's records although these files may also be found in the referring department's correspondence. When the files were received by the Chief Secretary's Office a brief abstract of the file was entered in the Index to Chief Secretary's Inwards Correspondence (VPRS 1411). Unlike other entries these were not followed by a Chief Secretary's registration number, but by a page number (referring to the relevant B.C. Register entry and the referring department's reference number.

This process changed by 1862 with the referred files being allocated a Chief Secretary registration number. This number was entered in the Registers of Inwards Correspondence (VPRS 1186) and in Index to Inward Correspondence (VPRS 1411). References in the Registers of Inward Correspondence for Blank Cover files and to the B.C. Register were written in red ink followed by the B.C. volume and page numbers.