'Owning' Military History

[rob love]

In fairness to the General, here is his complete post:

8 March 2016
Log Books
It’s interesting that there are three requests on the 3 Cav site for information about the ‘history’ of M113A1s that have been allocated to RSLs. One would have expected the log books to accompany the vehicles. I’ve suggested that the RSLs ask Defence for them.
If Defence hasn’t included the log books as part of the vehicles, then one hopes that they’ve been sent to Archives. In retrospect this would’ve been the preferable thing to do with the Centurion log books.
Presumably the log books were considered part of the vehicle and therefore accompanied the tanks sold to the public. Unfortunately the purchaser of the tanks later on-sold all the log books as a single lot to a private collector on a confidential basis. This collector now refuses to provide any details regarding the history of these tanks, eg. that owned by the Cairns Arty and Tank Museum.
The only Centurion log books now publically available are those at the AWM. These are for tanks which were supposedly disposed of as range targets … their log books went to Archives and thence to the AWM. (Unfortunately the log books for the tanks in the Tank Museum and elsewhere within Puckapunyal have simply ‘disappeared’.)
This raises the question (more a moral one than anything else) as to the extent that private individuals should be allowed to ‘own’ Australia’s military history for personal gratification.

Now he may have been talking about ownership of military artifacts, or he may be talking about the fact that a private individual ended up with the centurian logbooks and won't share them.

Note where the log books that were sent to the tank museum aren't....

I say it all goes to the planning and preperation of the governments in power. Save the history while it is still relatively fresh. It's not fair game to claim them back 50 years later, or put restrictions on the sale that were not there in the first place, thereby depriving the owner of the full market value of his investment.