The single most important document in Australian history, the Australian Constitution, is rarely revealed to the public anymore due to essential preservation.
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However, on Monday the National Archives of Australia held a discovery trail of the original paper complete with Queen Victoria's fading signature as part of its Family and Community Day celebrations.
Year five student from Radford College, Ava Smith, was intrigued with the making of the Constitution, and "that if the government didn't like a law that another government made they could just ring the British and ask to change the law."
The ten-year-old spent her morning at the Archives making paper poppies and origami boats in honour of the Anzac centenary, which was the theme for a rostrum speech she presented at her school this year. It was about an Australian soldier who wrote a heart-warming letter to his wife on the day he died during battle.
"I heard you could discover Anzacs [at Family and Community Day] so I thought it would be good to discover a bit more about him," she said.
She was excited to search for him through the Discovering Anzacs website, which the Archives staff held free workshops on throughout the day.The National Archives of Australia's Rhonda King said former prime minister John Howard announced a project called "A Gift to the Nation" in 2007 which included cataloguing unregistered service files from the First Word War, storing them in archivally-sound folders and scanning all the pages.
"We have about 380,000 records from World War One and they are all digitised. So if every record's got 40 pages in it that's millions and millions of pages which took about four years to digitise," Ms King said.
Visitors also enjoyed a special tour of the Archives' latest exhibition Life Interrupted: Gallipoli moments which describes life on the war front through the perspective of those who experienced it. And families took pictures cloaked in the Australian Flag imitating the patriotism of Marie Celeste, famous for being photographed wrapped in the flag in 1921.
The Archives was built around the same year the photo was taken and was designed by John Smith Murdoch, the architect of Old Parliament House. It documents more than 100 years of Australian Government records.
Some of Ms King's favourite items on display are playing cards banned by customs in the 1950s with pictures of half-dressed women akin to burlesque dancers holding teddy bears or umbrellas in strategic positions.
"It's probably my favourite item because I find that those sort of items, people are surprised by, because they're expecting it's going to be a memorandum from minister this to minister that," she said.
"But we've actually got some colourful, fun, interesting items."
