Imagining the Archive of Australian Youth Culture

This article advocates for an Archive of Australian Youth Culture in the context of scholarship suggesting that youth as a category of cultural, social, and historical development, is rarely afforded attention for its own sake in the archival record. In the Australian context, it considers tensions between the lack of youth culture presence in the archive in tandem with research that has placed young people and their cultural expressions at the centre of historical narratives. Examples of existing archives that have a focus on youth culture galvanise an approach to imagining and activating the purposes of a distinctly Australian archive. In its advocacy, the article argues that archives are not just spaces preoccupied with the past, but also generative places offering young people an understanding of how their present-day experiences help shape their future and future understanding of the social and cultural lives they have led. To consolidate this purposefulness, the article suggests that a national archive focused on youth culture history would provide an interactive, dynamic ‘third place’ or ‘space’ that could foster social cohesion among young Australians.